ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

2 31 polytope

Imagine you have a box with two doors on opposite sides. You can go in through one door and come out the other. Now imagine you have three of these boxes and you attach them all together, like Legos. You still have one door to go in and one to come out.

Now keep adding more boxes and attaching them together. Each time you add a box, you add another door to go in and out of. Keep doing this until you have 2,147,483,648 boxes all attached together. This is what mathematicians call a 2 31 polytope.

It's a really big and complex shape with a lot of sides and edges, but at its core it's just a bunch of boxes connected together. Just like how you can go in one door and out the other, you can go in one side of the shape and come out the other.

This shape is so big and complex that it's hard for us to even visualize it in our minds. But mathematicians study shapes like these to help us better understand the world around us.