I know this post’s title as the title of an old science fiction short story I read as a kid 35 years ago (it was already old! you be quiet) about a guy who builds his house as an unfolded tesseract net of cubes, but then there is an earthquake and the house folds itself along the fourth dimension and it becomes an actual hypercube, with the inhabitants lost and confused inside.
But I wonder now if that story’s title was already a reference to something else? Or do other people know that story?
I am referencing that story and it’s Wikipedia page says:
“‘—And He Built a Crooked House—’”[a] is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1941.[1] It was reprinted in the anthology Fantasia Mathematica (Clifton Fadiman, ed.) in 1958, and in the Heinlein collections The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag in 1959 and The Best of Robert Heinlein in 1973. The story is about a mathematically inclined architect named Quintus Teal who has what he thinks is a brilliant idea to save on real estate costs by building a house shaped like the unfolded net of a tesseract. The title is paraphrased from the nursery rhyme “There Was a Crooked Man”.
Wait, I think I remember this story! Thank you for the memory and now to see if I can find it again!
It was a reference to the mathematical Orb, or at least a cube version of it.
https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/circle-theorems.html
This can be used to make basically any complex data structures and store physical objects inside.