Why our boat (and the blog) is called Four Dimensions
Only two people have correctly guessed what the boat's name is about. One person asked me whether I was a mathematician (close, I'm an electronics engineer). Another person asked whether I was a physicist (close again) and whether the name was about spacetime (it isn't in fact, but not far off).
Naming boats is a tricky business. There are lots of boats on the canals with interesting names, and quite a lot more with somewhat unoriginal names (I'm trying to be tactful here, so let's not list any of these, but if you'd like to see some, try CanalPlan's list of most popular boat names). There are also many with traditional canal boat names (think here of birds, flowers, astronomical names; examples: Kingfisher, Poppy, Aurora). Many such names were also used on steam railway locomotives (think of George Stephenson's Rocket, and Robert Stephenson's North Star).
Let's deal with Four Dimensions though. I said I was an electronics engineer, but that wouldn't explain where the name came from. Among other things that I worked on during my career, I did research on digital processing of colour images, and was the first to employ four-dimensional hypercomplex numbers called quaternions to process them. My first published research article on this was in 1996. Here's a link to it (but sadly not open access). The four dimensions of the boat name are the four dimensions of the quaternions, in what mathematicians call Euclidean 4-space, a four-dimensional generalisation of the common 3-dimensional Euclidean space taught at school (remember learning about coordinates?). The four dimensions are all alike, whereas in spacetime (remember the person who asked whether I was a physicist), one of the four dimensions (time) is different to the other three (space). Let's not go into the technical details here, or you'll be reading a blog more like Feynmann's Lectures on Physics. Four dimensional Euclidean space has some interesting and weird properties. For example, you can turn a left-handed 3D object (like a glove or shoe) into a right-handed object by 'turning it over' through the fourth dimension. Imagine us in 3D space turning over a 2D glove-shaped paper cutout laid flat on a table, and you may grasp the idea. That's probably enough of that here though. The boat may be named Four Dimensions, but it is definitely a 3-dimensional object, and it is slightly smaller inside than it is outside (unlike Doctor Who's Tardis).
Another explanation of four dimensions is that all boats have length, beam (width), draught (depth below waterline) and air draught (height above waterline). But of course the two draughts are in the same dimension of 3-dimensional space.
One aspect of a name that many people don't seem to have considered is the ease with which it can be conveyed over the phone or a radio channel (e.g. marine VHF). Admittedly, Four Dimensions does prompt the question: 'Is that spelt out as a word or as the number 4?'. A short tricky name can be fine: Hygge, for example, can at least be spelled out as hotel - yankee - golf - golf - echo fairly easily, but if an unfamiliar name is long, spelling it out like this is rather tedious.
How do you choose a boat name then? Hire boat companies seem to pick themes, and popular ones seem to be flowers, birds, botanical names (there is a hire company that names its boats after types of weed - hopefully not Blanket Weed or Japanese Knotweed, but you never know). The advantage of a theme is obviously that once you have chosen the theme, lots of names can be chosen easily, much more easily than thinking of lots of unrelated names.
When choosing a name for your own boat you probably want something a bit more different or personal. I found this surprisingly hard. Some possible sources of inspiration are: lyrics or poems; names from literature or fiction, especially names of ships or spaceships, ocean liners (Majestic, Olympic, etc., but maybe not Titanic, although on the -ic theme we recently passed a boat named Pedantic); and of course online lists of ships, boats, railway locomotives, and anything else that might have a name that could be used.
Many mathematicians have claimed that breakthroughs in their thinking happened while doing something else (walking, cooking, washing up). But this normally happens only when you've been thinking over a problem, and apparently getting nowhere. So if you are trying to think of a name for your boat, make some lists, do some reading, browse suitable lists of names that you can find online or in encyclopedias, add some that you like to your own list. Then something may strike you (not literally) while you're not actually thinking about boat names. In the end, the name Four Dimensions occurred to me while I was lying in the bath pondering nothing much in particular. And mathematicians apparently sometimes make breakthroughs in their work while soaking in the bath, and presumably leap out dripping wet as Archimedes is reputed to have done, in order to write it down before they forget it.