Runcinated tesseract

Here's some complicated shit. More or less, the four-dimensional runcinated tesseract is the love child of super-intense geometry and science fiction nut-jobbery. Like, for real. When I see "4D "it only means one thing to this Doc Brown-influenced mind: time travel. Since I'm no physicist and didn't fully understand this article, I pieced this term together as well as I could:

Runcinated: At first glance, "runcinated" looked like "truncated" (come to find out, they're closely related). In 7th grade math class, we origami'd some "truncated tetrahedrons" and it was supes kewl. For those of you who aren't math whizzes, a truncated tetrahedron is a pyramid with the top cut off. It's easier to make than a paper crane, but more complex than those childish fortune tellers.*

Tesseract: A freaky ass time warp dealie (technical term), from Madeleine L'Engle's crazy train (read: amazing) novel "A Wrinkle in Time." I read it in 4th or 5th grade and totally understood it, which is insane because just reading the plot summary now makes my head feel like I just ate a gallon of ice cream in 7 seconds.

Back home, there's also an art store (read: a dilapidated witch's house that happened to have some art supplies for sale) called Tesseract. I went there pretty much every week from 3rd-6th grade with the Vial girls and Katie Gattoni, and we spent our allowance on Fimo, neon lanyard plastic and embroidery floss. Then we'd attempt to sell our wares in front of the Mequon Pool. We made like $3.75.

This all makes me wish I'd taken some sort of math after high school calculus (stats doesn't count), so I could have a greater appreciation for this shape. Because if runcinated = top cut off and tesseract = time travel-capable witch's house, then, as far as I'm concerned, a runcinated tesseract is really just an elusive home in need of some roof repairs. WRONG.

Although that does seem like an image ripped straight from the pages of "A Wrinkle in Time." Guess that's why this all made so much sense to me when I was 10.

*By childish, I obviously mean we made two of them at the bar on Friday night and used them to spark up conversations with strangers. True story. Make your own now!