Something about this feels like a comedy of manners about a recent fad for some section of mathematics instead of, say, learning Hungarian, blazing like smallpox through a set of the gentry ... combined with a touch of the Lovecraftian horror of revelation of subjects too large for a brain only recently post-simian, more tuned to hurling rocks than visualization of the perambulations of higher-order Platonics through a more understandable, lesser membrane. One might imagine the Thirteenth Duke of Wybourne, having commissioned from an artisan a fine set of Hinton cubes and, upon their reception, ensconced them in some parlour corner bit of cabinetry, only for a succession of his niece's acquaintances to fall victim to some palsy, seizure, or neurasthenic disorder purely because her companions were typically relegated to a particular chair near the offending objects of uncanny intellectual curiosity. Why do all of her friends fare so poorly?
Hunh. And here I would have thought that Hinton cubes were quite topical.
I wasn't entirely unserious about the fad, either. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions was made in 1884 and for a while, speculation and attempts at visualization of higher dimensions were popular. Hinton coined "tesseract" in 1888, and by 1904 his book The Fourth Dimension introduced his cubes. In one of Martin Gardner's books I had found a letter discussing a potential downsides of such studies, that some began to inescapably visualize the exercise progression which went along with Hinton's cubes, much to the dismay of a few afflicted.
The Thirteenth Duke of Wybourne, however, is from The Fast Show; I do a passable impression.
I believe he was also the person who first got P.D. Ouspensky published in English.
Edit: yes - he produced the first English translation of Ouspensky as early as 1919. Ouspensky was a refugee in Constantinople, had no idea the translation had come out, and Bradgon had no idea where he was. Eventually he found him and sent him a royalty check and this led to Ouspensky's emigrating to England.
It’s funny, I found the images somehow quite unsettling. Maybe it’s just that they look like drawings associated with magical work. Which, reading the comments here, they might be.
