Dimension

dimension, in common parlance, the measure of the size of an object, such as a box, usually given as length, width, and height. In mathematics, the notion of dimension is an extension of the idea that a line is one-dimensional, a plane is two-dimensional, and space is three-dimensional. In mathematics and physics one also considers higher-dimensional spaces, such as four-dimensional space-time, where four numbers are needed to characterize a point: three to fix a point in space and one to fix the time. Infinite-dimensional spaces, first studied early in the 20th century, have played an increasingly important role both in mathematics and in parts of physics such as quantum field theory, where they represent the space of possible states of a quantum mechanical system.

In differential geometry one considers curves as one-dimensional, since a single number, or parameter, determines a point on a curve—for example, the distance, plus or minus, from a fixed point on the curve. A surface, such as the surface of the Earth, has two dimensions, since each point can be located by a pair of numbers—usually latitude and longitude. Higher-dimensional curved spaces were introduced by the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann in 1854 and have become both a major subject of study within mathematics and a basic component of modern physics, from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the subsequent development of cosmological models of the universe to late-20th-century superstring theory.

In 1918 the German mathematician Felix Hausdorff introduced the notion of fractional dimension. This concept has proved extremely fruitful, especially in the hands of the Polish-French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the word fractal and showed how fractional dimensions could be useful in many parts of applied mathematics.