Charles Howard Hinton
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Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 1907) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He is thought to have coined the word tesseract, but is best known for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions. He also had a strong interest in theosophy.
In an 1880 article entitled "What is the Fourth Dimension?", Hinton proposed that the fourth dimension is time. This is presumably one of the earliest expressions of this idea, later embraced by Einstein's theory of relativity. Hinton later introduced a system of coloured cubes by the study of which, he claimed, it was possible to learn to visualise four-dimensional space (Casting out the Self, 1904). Rumours subsequently arose that these cubes had driven more than one hopeful person insane.
Hinton taught at Cheltenham Ladies College while he studied at Oxford, where he obtained his B.A. in 1877. From 1880 to 1886, he taught at the Uppingham School in Uppingham, Leicestershire, where Howard Candler, a friend of Edwin Abbott Abbott's also taught. British Society for the History of Mathematics [Gazeteer] Hinton also received his M.A. from Oxford in 1886.
Hinton's Scientific Romances, including "What is the Fourth Dimension?" and "A Plane World" were published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. during 1884–1886. In the introduction to "A Plane World", Hinton referred to Abbott's recent Flatland as having similar design but different intent. Abbot used the stories as "a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish in the first place to know the physical facts." Hinton's world existed on the surface of a sphere rather than a flat plane. He extended the connection to Abbott's work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plain Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).
Hinton was convicted of bigamy for marrying both Mary Everest Boole (daughter of George Boole, the founder of mathematical logic) and Maud Wheldon. He served a single day in prison sentence, then moved with Mary Everest Boole and their children, first to Japan (1886) and later to Princeton University in 1893 as an instructor in mathematics.
In 1897, he designed a gunpowder-powered baseball pitching machine for the Princeton baseball team's batting practice. Hinton, Charles, "A Mechanical Pitcher", Harper's Weekly, March 20, 1897, p. 301–302 According to one source it caused several injuries, and may have been in part responsible for Hinton's dismissal from Princeton that year. Archived [Internet reference] However, the machine was versatile, capable of variable speeds with an adjustable breech size, and firing curve balls by the use of two rubber coated steel fingers at the muzzle of the pitcher. Hinton, Charles, "The Motion of a Baseball", The Yearbook of the Minneapolis Society of Engineers, May, 1908, p. 18–28 He successfully introduced the machine to the University of Minnesota where Hinton worked as an assistant professor until 1900, when he resigned to move to the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.
At the end of his life, Hinton worked as an examiner of chemical patents for the United States Patent Office. He died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 30, 1907. "Scientist Drops Dead", Washington Post, May 1, 1907. Several of these references are cited in the introduction to the book Speculations on the Fourth Dimension, edited by Rudolf Rucker.
Influence
Hinton was one of the many thinkers who circulated in Jorge Luis Borges's of writers. Hinton is mentioned in Borges's short story, El milagro secreto (The secret miracle):"The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series."
Notes
Books
- Scientific Romances: First and Second Series, orig. 1884 and 1885, reprinted 1976 with an introduction by James Webb, Arno Press, ISBN 0405079540
- The Fourth Dimension, orig. 1904, 1912 by Ayer Co., Kessinger Press reprint, ISBN 0405079532
- Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, edited by Rudolf Rucker, 1980, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-23916-0 (includes selections from Scientific Romances and The Fourth Dimension, "The Recognition of the Fourth Dimension" from the 1902 Bulletin of the Philosophical Society of Washington, and excerpts from An Episode on Flatland)
External link
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