Tesseracts and Madeleine L'Engle  Posted: Oct 11, 2007  Over the
weekend, children's author Madeleine L'Engle died at 88. Her
most noted work, A Wrinkle in Time, is a story about a girl's
journey across the universe in an effort to rescue both her
father and the galaxy itself from the evil "Black Thing." The
book, which dealt with heady (and un-kid-friendly) concepts like
religion, theoretical mathematics and evil, took years to
finally find a publisher due to its perceived weirdness. Since
finally going into print in 1962, Wrinkle has sold millions of
copies and remains a favorite read for young teens today. One
concept L'Engle explored in the book was tessering, a method
whereby people could traverse great distances in the universe by
"folding" space and time. Although they don't behave in exactly
the way L'Engle describes, tesseracts do exist, and serve as
important and elegant examples of multidimensional space. An
actual tesseract is best described as a four dimensional
cube...and is kind of confusing. S