The Tesseract: Origin, Meaning, and Its Marvel Connection

I first heard of the term Tesseract in the movie Captain America: The First Avenger. The Tesseract is also called the cube in the movie and it contains the space stone, one of the six infinity stones. In the movie The Avengers it is used to create a wormhole to allow the Chitauri to invade New York. For more about the tesseract in the Marvel Universe, see their fandom article.

Only recently did I read that Tesseract is a term coined by Charles Howard Hinton in the nineteenth century for a four-dimensional hypercube. At the time there was a lot of buzz of extra dimensions and some people linked higher dimensions mysticism, a place where the ghosts lived an a way to magically transport to other places. Hinton was a mathematician and a writer. He spent time thinking about ways how to best visualise the fourth dimension. To this we owe a famous visualisation of the tesseract. Similarly to how one can flatten a cube into a plane by cutting its surface and unfolding it into a cross, the hypercube can be similar unfolded into 3 dimensions in the shape of cross of cubes as shown on the side. More technical details about the four-dimensional hypercube can be found on Wikipedia.