If you read the article here then you will get a sense of this shape that Jaron Lanier has helped make famous on behalf of HSM Coxeter and Branko Grünbaum. Another article can be found here that came out 18 days later, written by Ivars Peterson. Each of these links are filled with relavant links themselves so I won't duplicate them here. On 5-21-07 it will be made public at the ISAMA 07 that the formerly dubbed "Hendecatope" will be changed to "Hendecachoron" for a variety of reasons. It is also known as the "11-cell" which may have also brought you here.

If you happened to come here, then you no doubt have a fascination with this shape like myself, the authors listed and probably a ton of other people. There is a fairly diluted Wikipedia article here, but with a great picture by a guy on Wikipedia Tom Ruen who spends a lot of time making graphics for these articles. We owe him a debt of gratitude as well as Carlo Séquin and Jaron Lanier for showing a visual for this shape.

As time goes on, I will be adding more sections called "who", "what", "where", "when" and "why". I know, so creative. And this section you are looking at right now will become the blog proper. What is here currently will be dispersed into the 5 W pages. It is aggregated now because I just started the blog. But in the end, this site will explain everything there is to know about this shape, the 57-cell and its non-abstract 4 dimensional cousins, including hyperbolic tesselations and other honeycombs. There will be an art section devoted to higher dimensional shapes, and a visualization section devoted to helping people progress (evolve) their visual abilities. If your muscles can grow from exercise, so can centers of your brain.

Why did I bother doing this?

To stop a speculator from grabbing either hendecachoron.com or 11-cell.com so that if someone types it in, you end up looking at a dynamic search page, for say, mortgages. Or, for example, www.tesseract.com which has nothing to do with geometry, but rather goes to a human resources firm (of course!), and has an old lady on the right who appears to be in pain? Maybe she is trying to visualize a 4-dimensional abstract polytope. That can hurt. I am less worried about the 57-cell or pentacontaheptachoron because hendecachoron is already hard enough to type and say out loud.

Because thanks to the Discover article, I am obsessed with this shape. If you go to my www.headcircus.com, you will see I am already obsessed with 4+ dimensional shapes anyway and have even begun to try to incorporate them into my designs