In this chapter, it is harder to find projects for lower-level students. Most of the things I'm thinking of (programs to show Dali's horse, for instance) would require more computer literacy than most middle-schoolers have. For particularly artistically talented students, creating a stereographic projection of something--the world, a tennis ball (I'd love to see this), whatever--would be a possible project. A human head isn't really spherical, but would it still work as a stereographic projection?
The projections of the Clifford torus and the explanations that went with them sort of startled me. I had always thought that the image on the cover of our book was a view of the inside of some 4-D figure, not the outside. Thinking of it as an external view is a little disorienting.
I don't understand how the grid forms a polyhedral torus.
I had never noticed before that the central projection of the hypercube and the polyhedral torus look pretty much the same in three-space if you fill in the correct sides.
Is there any etymological significance to "tesseract," or did Hinton just think it sounded cool?
I really enjoyed this chapter. It made me wish I had a stronger programming background. I'm looking forward to the next chapter.