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In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it. Thus a line has a dimension of one because only one coordinate is needed to specify a point on itfor example, the point at 5 on a number line. A surface such as a plane or the surface of a cylinder or sphere has a dimension of two because two coordinates are needed to specify a point on itfor example, both a latitude and longitude are required to locate a point on the surface of a sphere. The inside of a cube, a cylinder or a sphere is three-dimensional because three coordinates are needed to locate a point within these spaces. In classical mechanics, space and time are different categories and refer to absolute space and time. That conception of the world is a four-dimensional space but not the one that was found necessary to describe electromagnetism. The four dimensions of spacetime consist of events that are not absolutely defined spatially and temporally, but rather are known relative to the motion of an observer. Minkowski space first approximates the universe without gravity; the pseudo-Riemannian manifolds of general relativity describe spacetime with matter and gravity. Ten dimensions are used to describe string theory, and the state-space of quantum mechanics is an infinite-dimensional function space. The concept of dimension is not restricted to physical objects. High-dimensional spaces frequently occur in mathematics and the sciences. They may be parameter spaces or configuration spaces such as in Lagrangian or Hamiltonian mechanics; these are abstract spaces, independent of the physical space we live in. == In mathematics == In mathematics, the dimension of an object is an intrinsic property independent of the space in which the object is embedded. For example, a point on the unit circle in the plane can be specified by two Cartesian coordinates, but a single polar coordinate (the angle) would be sufficient, so the circle is 1-dimensional even though it exists in the 2-dimensional plane. This ''intrinsic'' notion of dimension is one of the chief ways the mathematical notion of dimension differs from its common usages. The dimension of is . When trying to generalize to other types of spaces, one is faced with the question "what makes -dimensional?" One answer is that to cover a fixed ball in by small balls of radius , one needs on the order of such small balls. This observation leads to the definition of the Minkowski dimension and its more sophisticated variant, the Hausdorff dimension, but there are also other answers to that question. For example, the boundary of a ball in looks locally like and this leads to the notion of the inductive dimension. While these notions agree on , they turn out to be different when one looks at more general spaces. A tesseract is an example of a four-dimensional object. Whereas outside mathematics the use of the term "dimension" is as in: "A tesseract ''has four dimensions''", mathematicians usually express this as: "The tesseract ''has dimension 4''", or: "The dimension of the tesseract ''is'' 4". Although the notion of higher dimensions goes back to René Descartes, substantial development of a higher-dimensional geometry only began in the 19th century, via the work of Arthur Cayley, William Rowan Hamilton, Ludwig Schläfli and Bernhard Riemann. Riemann's 1854 Habilitationsschrift, Schläfli's 1852 ''Theorie der vielfachen Kontinuität'', Hamilton's 1843 discovery of the quaternions and the construction of the Cayley algebra marked the beginning of higher-dimensional geometry. The rest of this section examines some of the more important mathematical definitions of the dimensions. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「dimension」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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