The book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott explores the concept of physical dimensions through characters who encounter higher-dimensional beings. The protagonist, “A. Square,” ...

The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black ...

Ok, say I have many pentagons. <BR><BR>I want to build an orb or sphere or whatever a 3 dimensional ball out of pentagons.<BR><BR>Is there a predetermined limit to the # of pentagon shaped pieces I ...

The telescope conjecture gave mathematicians a handle on ways to map one sphere to another. Now that it has been disproved, the universe of shapes has exploded. In early June, buzz built as ...

In math, the search for optimal patterns never ends. The sphere-packing problem — which asks how to cram balls into a (high-dimensional) box as efficiently as possible — is no exception. It has ...