This story starts in the fourth dimension.
Or, more specifically, with a British mathematician who, in the late 1800s, was intrigued by the fourth dimension and how to teach disinterested children about it.
Charles Hinton wore a lot of hats. He wrote sci-fi stories before there was sci-fi — he called them “scientific romances.” At Princeton, where he worked for a time as mathematics instructor, he invented a baseball pitching machine powered by gunpowder. He also practiced polygamy, which was against both the mores and laws of his native England. And when he was convicted of bigamy in the 1880s, he was forced to move his young family to Japan where he found work teaching mathematics.
We will save all of that for the biopic, because for the purposes of this story, Hinton was the unintentional inspiration behind the jungle gym — the patent for which has just turned 100.
It turns out that the history of the jungle gym, and its sibling the monkey bars, is full of weird and delightful twists and sub-plots that take us from Japan to suburban Chicago and touch on child development theories and, yes, theoretical math.
Imagining dimensions — in bamboo
Hinton was a mathematician who explored the concept of the fourth dimension and how to represent it. His model of a tesseract as a way to represent the fourth dimension in geometrical space has since inspired a long lineage of science fiction writing and movies — from A Wrinkle in Time to Interstellar.