Talk:Charles Howard Hinton

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this infomation does not seem correct —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 222.152.26.148 (talk • contribs) 02:37, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Could you be a little more specific? --Trovatore 02:45, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Merge request

I would agree on merging these articles, assuming that ana and kata searches would link to Charles Howard Hinton, and that these 4th dimensional directions would be mentioned in the Charles Howard Hinton page (duh). As of the time I write this, there is no mention of either direction on his page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.206.244.139 (talk • contribs) 19:28, May 8, 2006 (UTC)

Ana and kata should be merged with Spissitude. They all discuss the exact same thing, do they not? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.25.138.179 (talk • contribs) 17:41, May 30, 2006 (UTC)

• Uhh.. not so fast.. the dimension label "Spissitude" appears to have been coined much earlier by Henry More (1614-1687), with its directions ana and kata coined by Alicia Boole Stott, (3rd daughter of George Boole). If she lived prior to Mr. Hinton's work, then she should be recognized. Even so, this dimension and its two 'directions' more aptly belong in the article on Fourth dimension (geometry). Vonkje 20:57, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

• • .. what's more, uppercase 'A' followed by 'na', or uppercase 'K' followed by 'ana' are proper names of certain Japanese martial arts (as far as I can tell). This should be more reason to merge this terminology into the geometry article mentioned above. Vonkje 21:04, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't think so. These terms never caught on; they're of historical interest only, and the relevant historical context is that of Hinton. In my opinion they don't belong in math articles. --Trovatore 02:48, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh, I hadn't noticed that the "geometry" article you were talking about was spissitude. That article is equally bogus, and should be merged into Henry More. WP should not be giving the impression that any of these terms are accepted mathematical usage. --Trovatore 07:06, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Whoops, no you weren't. My reading comprehension seems to be off today. Then I really do have to disagree with you strongly; none of the three terms (ana, kata, spissitude) belongs in any math article, except as a historical footnote. But they could legitimately be mentioned in the articles about their coiners. --Trovatore 07:12, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Weird Redirect

So why does ana redirect here? I know the link, but if I wanted to find out about an ana, I would be greatly confused. Why did we merge these again? Optimusnauta 15:10, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Did Hinton anticipate Einstein in conceiving a 4D space-time?

In the 1912 ed. of The Fourth Dimension, originally published in April, 1904, Hinton writes on p. 153,

We must suppose the cubes turned round each of the axes, the red line, and the yellow line, then something, which was given as time before, will now be given as the plane creature's space; something, which was given as space before, will now be given as a time series as the cube is passed through the plane."

Einstein's "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" was published on June 30, 1905 over a year after Hinton's first edition. --Jbergquist (talk) 05:29, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

See Spacetime#Mathematical concept for very early consideration of time as a fourth dimension. Hinton is on record from 1884 with his wikisource:What is the Fourth Dimension?:

Why, then, should not the four-dimensional beings be ourselves, and our successive states the passing of them through the three-dimensional space to which our consciousness in confined.

So Hinton preceded Einstein but he was not the originator of the idea. In 1908 Minkowski explicitly denoted one dimension as temporal in his universe, but its mathematics was anticipated by hyperbolic quaternions. By popularizing the conception and speculating on its importance Hinton prepared the reading public for modern physics.Rgdboer (talk) 22:17, 18 January 2015 (UTC)