"—And He Built a Crooked House"

"'—And He Built a Crooked House—'" is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1941. It was reprinted in the anthology Fantasia Mathematica in 1958, and in the Heinlein collections The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag in 1959 and The Best of Robert Heinlein in 1973. The story is about a mathematically inclined architect named Quintus Teal who has what he thinks is a brilliant idea to save on real estate costs by building a house shaped like the unfolded net of a tesseract. The title is paraphrased from the nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man".