Dimensions is a French project that makes educational movies about mathematics, focusing on spatial geometry. It uses POV-Ray to render some of the animations, and the films are released under a Creative Commons licence.
The film is separated in nine chapters, which follow this plot:
- Chapter 1: Dimension two explains Earth's coordinate system, and introduces the stereographic projection.
- Chapter 2: Dimension three discusses how two-dimensional beings would imagine three-dimensional objects.
- Chapters 3 and 4: The fourth dimension talk about four-dimensional polytopes (polychora), projecting the regular ones stereographically on the three-dimensional space.
- Chapters 5 and 6: Complex numbers are about the square root of negative numbers, transformations, and fractals.
- Chapters 7 and 8: Fibration show what a fibration is. Complex numbers are used again, and there are circles and tori rotating and being transformed.
- Chapter 9: Proof emphasizes the importance of proofs in mathematics, and proves the circle-conservationess of the stereographic projection as an example.
Famous quotes containing the word dimensions:
“I was surprised by Joe’s asking me how far it was to the Moosehorn. He was pretty well acquainted with this stream, but he had noticed that I was curious about distances, and had several maps. He and Indians generally, with whom I have talked, are not able to describe dimensions or distances in our measures with any accuracy. He could tell, perhaps, at what time we should arrive, but not how far it was.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)