1. THE DALI CROSS AND DIMENSION

Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989) was a Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. He was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his work. His illustrated 1954 painting Crucifixion or Corpus Hypercubicus is of special mathematical interest.

Think of the sequence: a single point (0 dimensions); a line segment (1 dimension); a square (2 dimensions); a cube (3 dimensions); a ‘hypercube’ – the analogue in 4 dimensions. We can obtain a square by linking 4 segments in 2 dimensions; a cube by folding 6 squares in 3 dimensions; a hypercube by ‘folding’ 8 cubes in 4 dimensions? The Dali cross is the 3-dimensional ‘net’ of the hypercube.

http://paulscott.info/ polyhedra/polytopes/hypercubes.html