An international team of researchers has proposedprovide mathematicians with their own periodic table but in shapes. Scientists from the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and Russia have set out to define the basic pillars of all possible forms of the Universe in three, four and five dimensions, and also analyze the relationships between these components.
“The periodic table is one of the most important tools in chemistry. It describes the atoms that make up matter and explains their chemical properties. With our work we want to achieve an equivalent for forms of three, four and five dimensions,” he explains Alessio Corti, researcher at the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London (UK) and coordinator of the project. In other words, the goal is “to create a directory in which all the basic pieces of geometry appear and where the properties of each of them are described by means of relatively simple equations.”
The team is confident that some 500 million shapes can be algebraically defined in 4 dimensions. Among them they hope to identify several thousandindivisible. “These basic pieces can be thought of as ‘atoms’ and the larger shapes as ‘molecules’. The next challenge is to understand how the properties of large shapes depend on the ‘atoms’ that make them up. In other words,we want to generate a chemical theory of the forms“clarifies Tom Coates, member of the team.
Four and five dimensions
One of the most curious aspects of his research is that the multidimensional complexity of many of these forms is not completely visible. To considerthe concept of time as a fourth dimensionadded to the three that shape everyday reality, it is not easy. As if that were not enough, the project will includeup to five dimensions, although string theory suggests that there may be many more.
The knowledge of these types of forms is very important in a large number of scientific questions. Number theory, theoretical physics, and computer vision are good examples of this. ? Robotics experts may have to solve the equation for a five-dimensional shape to understand how to tell a robot to look at an object and then move its arm to pick it up ,? explains Coates.
