Charles Howard Hinton

Born in 1853, Charles Howard Hinton was a British mathematician and writer whose name is closely tied to the fourth dimension and the word "tesseract." He studied at Oxford and became known for essays and books that tried to make higher-dimensional space easier to picture, blending geometry with vivid thought experiments and speculative fiction.

His life was also unusually eventful. After leaving England, he spent time in Japan and later worked in the United States, including at Princeton, while continuing to publish mathematical and philosophical writing. That mix of serious study and imaginative reach helped give his work a lasting place in both the history of ideas and the history of science fiction.

Though he died in 1907, Hinton's influence lasted well beyond his own era. Readers still return to him for the strange, exciting way he invited ordinary people to think beyond the visible world.