Helge von koch biography of albert

It is second nature to think of integer dimensions:  A line is one dimensional.  A plane is two dimensional. A volume is three dimensional.  A point has no dimensions.

It is harder to think in four dimensions and higher, but even here it is a simple extrapolation of lower dimensions.  Consider the basis vectors spanning a three-dimensional space consisting of the triples of numbers

Then a four dimensional hyperspace is just created by adding a new “tuple” to the list

and so on to 5 and 6 dimensions and on.  Child’s play!

But how do you think of fractional dimensions?  What is a fractional dimension?  For that matter, what is a dimension?  Even the integer dimensions began to unravel when George Cantor showed in 1877 that the line and the plane, which clearly had different “dimensionalities”, both had the same cardinality and could be put into a one-to-one correspondence.  From then onward the concept of dimension had to be rebuilt from the ground up, leading ultimately to fractals.

Here is a short history of fractal dimension, partially excerpted from my history of dynamics in Galileo Unbound (Oxford University Press, 2018) pg. 110 ff.  This blog page presents the history through a set of publications that succes

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