Tesseract Takes Shape in the Wall Street Journal

A Theoretical Physicist Wanted His Seattle Home Devoid of Curves. ‘It’s The Influence of Linear Algebra on Me.’

Dave Bacon, who works at Google, hired a local architecture firm to make his Midcentury Modern house more rectangular and open the space up to the view.

On the surface, the some $1.8 million renovation of Dave Bacon and Cindy Wood Bacon’s Midcentury Modern home in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle was pretty straightforward: updating the kitchen, opening up the main living space and changing finishes.

A closer look reveals a much more unusual project, dictated primarily by the character of its owner.

Mr. Bacon, 47, is a theoretical physicist and the leader of a team of engineers at Google who are writing software to run and program its quantum computers. As a result of his training, he says, he doesn’t like curves. “It’s the influence of linear algebra on me,” he says. While you sometimes act on curvy objects in linear algebra, the larger concern is with how those curves interact with more rectangular type objects, he says. This way of splitting up spaces leads to what people call finite polytopes; an example of a polytope is a cube.

You can read the article by Nancy Keates in its entirety in the Wall Street Journal and online in Mansion Global.