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“Polytopia I uses, text, tables, movies and interactive graphics to explore ways polygons can spread out in sheets or curl up into balls. The sequel Polytopia II pursues these themes into higher dimensions. The prettiest parts of Polytopia I are the movies: imaginatively conceived and nicely ray-traced, with objects rendered in subtle colours and pleasingly textured materials including transparents. There is nice scenery, too: fractals, Leonardo sketches, the Pleiades, rippling water and reflective spheres in which you almost expect to catch the eye of Maurits Escher. Polytopia II largely abandons the photorealistic world of bright, hard surfaces in favour of jaggy wire-frame graphics against a dark background... But they come into their own on the second disc as we meet objects whose structure is more than skin deep. What is lost in ray-traced eye appeal is gained in interactivity and potential for learning. If you cannot have a physical model of a polyhedron or honeycomb in your hand, it does help to be able to turn it around and view it from all angles on the computer... The mathematical content is leavened with history and philosophy... Computer graphics like those of Polytopia II (or the pioneering work of Thomas Banchoff during the 1980's) are probably the closest we can get to mentally grasping the worlds of 4D, 5D and beyond.”
Times Higher Educational Supplement
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