Penn State prof designs and builds structure that looks a fourth dimension.

New mathematics based sculpture at Penn State looks beyond three dimensions. The sculpture, designed by Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, presents a three-dimensional "shadow" of a four-dimensional solid object. Ocneanu's research involves mathematical models for quantum field theory based on symmetry. One aspect of his work is modeling regular solids, both mathematically and physically. In the three-dimensional world, there are five regular solids -- tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron -- whose faces are composed of triangles, squares or pentagons. In four dimensions, there are six regular solids, which can be built based on the symmetries of the three-dimensional solids. Unfortunately, humans cannot process information in four dimensions directly because we don't see the universe that way. Although mathematicians can work with a fourth dimension abstractly by adding a fourth coordinate to the three that we use to describe a point in space, a fourth spatial dimension is difficult to visualize. For that, models are needed.

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Education

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• Adrian
• Ocneanu
• Penn
• State
• fourth
• 4D
• octacube

[MrSkateholic]

i live near penn state, i now ive seen this, im definitly goin there for college.

[Theyallfloatdownhere]

@MsWanderer1 Yes it is a function of motion, but it is also a direction. Which allows it to be a dimension. Not that abstract.

[Zurround100]

there is a theory that our universe is 3 dimensional but on the surface of a 4 dimensional hypersphere.

[MsWanderer1]

Mathematics is inherently abstract; reality is not. Abstract thinking of reality as being in more than three dimensions of length is pure nonsense. Though Time is called the forth dimension, it is only a quantitative measure required to define motion of objects in 3D spatial volumes. All quantitative measurement must be capable of being reduced to the 2 fundamental dimensions of length and time. Mass is not a fundamental dimension, it is a function of uniform motion.