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A Mathematician's Guided Tour Through Higher Dimensions | WIRED

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The concept of a dimension seems simple enough, but mathematicians struggled for centuries to precisely define and understand it.

Save this story Save this story The notion of dimension at first seems intuitive. Glancing out the window we might see a crow sitting atop a cramped flagpole experiencing zero dimensions, a robin on a telephone wire constrained to one, a pigeon on the ground free to move in two and an eagle in the air enjoying three. But as we’ll see, finding an explicit definition for the concept of dimension and pushing its boundaries has proved exceptionally difficult for mathematicians. It’s taken hundreds of years of thought experiments and imaginative comparisons to arrive at our current rigorous underst

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