1 HN user recommended this explainer1 month2021–2023score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Used as a friendly example of high-dimensional geometry showing up in a simple problem, and of ball volume shrinking inside a hypercube.
Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.
“There's a nice video about this from Numberphile and 3blue1brown” (HN, 2023)
You can and as the dimensions go up the volume of the inscribed ball as a percentage of the volume of the hypercube shrinks down a lot. There's a nice video about this from Numberphile and 3blue1brown - [this video]
Nice video on ball volume shrinking within a hypercube.
I think it's easier to approach higher dimensions without talking about spatial dimensions at all. For example - Darts in Higher Dimensions, 3blue1brown and Numberphile - [this video] Or even more trivially, you can think of a table where every row is some entity and every column is some attribute associated to it. For example, make a spreadsheet where each row is a person and the columns are age, height, weight, salary, and years to retirement - then you can think of each person as a point in 5-d space. And some properties are intuitively obvious - for example as you keep adding more columns it becomes more difficult to find people who are similar to each other. It's a pretty accessible way to introduce high dimensions without talking about tessaracts.
Example of approaching higher dimensions without spatial intuition.
Higher dimensional geometry can show up in lower dimensional problems. This numberphile video ( [this video] ) involves a puzzle about throwing darts at a dart board which is solved by using the volumes of 4+ dimensional spheres.
Darts puzzle solved with volumes of 4+ dimensional spheres.
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