The Iron Man hyperspace formula really works (hypercube visualising, Euler's n-D polyhedron formula) @Mathologer

Uploaded August 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

On the menu today are some very nice mathematical miracles clustered around the notion of mathematical higher-dimensional spaces, all tied together by the powers of (x+2). Very mysterious :) Some things to look forward to: The counterparts of Euler's polyhedron formula in all dimensions, a great mathematical moment in the movie Iron man 2, making proper sense of hupercubes, higher-dimensional shadow play and a pile of pretty proofs.

00:00 Intro
01:17 Chapter 1: Iron man
06:05 Chapter 2: Towel man
11:16 Cauchy's proof of Euler's polyhedron formula
17:37 Chapter 3: Beard man
22:16 Tristans proof that (x+2)^n works
26:16 Chapter 4: No man
28:52 Shadows of spinning cubes animation
28:42 Thanks

Here is a link to a zip file with the Mathematica notebooks for creating the cube and hypercube shadows that I discuss at the end of the video in chapter 4.

qedcat.com/cube_hypercube.zip

If you don't have Mathematica, you can have a look at pdf versions of the programs that are also part of the zip archive or you can use the free CDF player to open the cdf versions of the notebooks.

Something I forgot to mention: There is also another purely algebraic incarnations of this process of growing the cubes. It comes in the form of a recursion formula that connects the different numbers of bits and pieces in consecutive dimensions. That recursion formula is also present at the bottom of the "iron man page". Have a close look :) Also, in the Marvel movies the cube that Tony Stark is holding in the thumbnail of this video is called the Tesseract. Probably worth pointing out that "tesseract" is another name for a 4-d cube. I also built an easter egg into the thumbnail that plays on this fact:
imgur.com/a/psIy28k

The formulae for n-d tetrahedra and octahedra can be found on this page;

https://people.math.osu.edu/fiedorowicz.1/math655/HyperEuler.html

Here is a link to my video on solving the 4d Hyper Rubik's Cube

youtu.be/yhPH1369OWc

Another proof of Moessner for cubes using cubical shells Anthony Harradine and Anita Ponsaing

qedcat.com/StrikeMeOut.pdf

Here is a really nice video on the 120-cell that I only mentioned in passing.

youtu.be/MFXRRW9goTs

Noteworthy from the comments:
Today's video was "triggered" by a comment made by Godfrey Pigott on the last video on Moessner's miracle in which he pointed out that (x+2)^n captures the vital statistics of the n-dimensional cube.

Z. Michael Gehlke There is an easy way to see this: (x^1 + 2*x^0) describes the parts of a line; all of the cubes are iterated products of lines: n-cube = (1-cube)^n. Therefore, all cubes are described by iterated powers of (x^1 + 2*x^0)^n. (Me: Nice insight. Of course needs some fleshing out to make this work on it's own, like in the comment by ...

HEHEHE I AM A SUPAHSTAR SAGA I came up with an even simpler visual proof. Take a cube of side length x+2. This cube has a volume (x+2)^3. Now, slice the cube six times. Each slicing plane is parallel to a face and 1 unit deeper than the face. Don't throw away any volume. What you're left with is an inner cube of side length x (volume x^3), 6 square pieces of volume x^2, 12 edge pieces of volume x, and 8 corner cubes with volume 1 each. Adding up these volumes gives you the original (x+2)^3 volume, so it's proven. This works in any dimension.

Here is a link to an animation of this idea that I put on Mathologer 2, as a reward to those of you who who are keen enough to actually read these descriptions. youtu.be/cAVvwmcKsFk

Typo: The numbers of vertices and faces of the dodecahedron got switched.

Today's music is Floating Branch by Muted.

Enjoy!

Burkard

The Iron Man hyperspace formula really works (hypercube visualising, Eulers n-D polyhedron formula)

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$Why did we forget this simple visual solution? (Lills method) Todays video is about Lills method, an unexpectedly simple and highly visual way of finding solutions of polynomial equations (using turtles and lasers). After introducing the method I focus on a couple of stunning applications: pretty ways to solve quadratic equations with ruler and compass and cubic equations with origami, Horners form, synthetic division and a newly discovered incarnation of Pascals famous triangle. 00:00 Intro 04:14 Lills method 07:31 Free meal 09:51 Square turtles 11:39 Origami turtles 14:16 Iterative turtles 17:32 QED 24:00 Pascals turtle animation Here is the page with an implementation of Lills method for cubic polynomials that I show in the video. http://www.qedcat.com/misc/lill_method/ Its an adaptation of this webpage http://heim.ifi.uio.no/magho/lill/ (I have not been able to find out who put this together originally). The article that inspired this video is this: Thomas C. Hull, Solving Cubics With Creases: The Work of Beloch and Lill, The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 118, No. 4 (April 2011), pp. 307-315. Here is a link to this article on Thomas Hulls webpage: http://mars.wne.edu/~thull/papers/amer.math.monthly.118.04.307-hull.pdf Lills original paper: http://www.numdam.org/article/NAM_1867_2_6 359_0.pdf Other good references include: Polynomials as polygons by Serge Tabachnikov https://www.math.psu.edu/tabachni/prints/Polynomials.pdf Dan Kalmans book Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomia and Related Realms (the first chapter is about the Horner form and Lills method) https://books.google.com.au/books?id=JPq0pS3wrx4C&pg=PA7&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false Thank you very much to Marty, Karl and Danil for their help with this video. One version of todays math t-shirt (Zombie addition): https://www.redbubble.com/people/manikx/works/8929883-zombie-math?p=t-shirt The piece of music at the end is called Fresh fallen snow by Chris Haugen from the free YouTube music library. Really neat 1-line Mathematica code for the generation of the Pascal turtle which appeared on Reddit after the video was posted there: Graphics[Table[Line[ReIm[Accumulate[Table[2^(-n/2)Binomial[n,k]Exp[I(4+2k-n)Pi/4],{k,-1,n}]]]],{n,0,7}]] and another nice implementation in Python (with a real turtle graphics turtle) by Alex Hall https://repl.it/repls/DeepskyblueFractalPoint Enjoy :) Mathologer Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mathologer Mathologer PayPal: paypal.me/mathologer (see the Patreon page for details)$

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$Pi is IRRATIONAL: animation of a gorgeous proof NEW (Christmas 2019). Two ways to support Mathologer Mathologer Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mathologer Mathologer PayPal: paypal.me/mathologer (see the Patreon page for details) This video is my best shot at animating and explaining my favourite proof that pi is irrational. It is due to the Swiss mathematician Johann Lambert who published it over 250 years ago. The original write-up by Lambert is 58 pages long and definitely not for the faint of heart (http://www.kuttaka.org/~JHL/L1768b.pdf). On the other hand, among all the proofs of the irrationality of pi, Lamberts proof is probably the most natural one, the one thats easiest to motivate and explain, and one thats ideally suited for the sort of animations that I do. Anyway its been an absolute killer to put this video together and overall this is probably the most ambitious topic Ive tackled so far. I really hope that a lot of you will get something out of it. If you do please let me know :) Also, as usual, please consider contributing subtitles in your native language (English and Russian are under control, but everything else goes). One of the best short versions of Lamberts proof is contained in the book Autour du nombre pi by Jean-Pierre Lafon and Pierre Eymard. In particular, in it the authors calculate an explicit formula for the n-th partial fraction of Lamberts tan x formula; here is a scan with some highlighting by me: http://www.qedcat.com/misc/chopped.png Have a close look and youll see that as n goes to infinity all the highlighted terms approach 1. Whats left are the Maclaurin series for sin x on top and that for cos x at the bottom and this then goes a long way towards showing that those partial fractions really tend to tan x. There is a good summary of other proofs for the irrationality of pi on this wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_π_is_irrational Todays main t-shirt I got from from Zazzle: https://www.zazzle.com.au/25_dec_31_oct_t_shirt-235809979886007646 (there are lots of places that sell HO cubed t-shirts) lf you liked this video maybe also consider checking out some of my other videos on irrational and transcendental numbers and on continued fractions and other infinite expressions. The video on continued fractions that I refer to in this video is my video on the most irrational number: https://youtu.be/CaasbfdJdJg Special thanks to my friend Marty Ross for lots of feedback on the slideshow and some good-humoured heckling while we were recording the video. Thank you also to Danil Dimitriev for his ongoing Russian support of this channel. Merry Christmas!$