TO THE NTH DIMENSION... AND BACK
Innovations with John Hartz

This is an outline of the topics covered in the 1987 Innovations episode "To the Nth Dimension... and Back" (WNET/Thirteen, New Jersey).

"Space is a metaphor."
Tony Robbins, artist (notice his t-shirt)
rotating a 3-D cube
rotating a 4-D hypercube
edges and faces of a hypercube
Ron Graham, mathematician
Nat Levine
communication networks
the simplex method (linear programming) (10 minutes)
scheduling
"The whole universe itself is very mathematical in its structure."
fractals
Benoit Mandelbrot
fractional dimension
Richard Voss and fractals as images
"If we watch the way... trees grow, we always get a fractal."
Square One Television (19 minutes)
infinity
Joel Schneider
"Less mathematics means less opportunity."
"Time is spent... not learning to solve interesting problems."
"Primary school kids... report mathematics as one of their favorite subjects, then by the time they get to junior and senior high school, large numbers of people are saying 'I hate math'... something is happening in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade... it may have to do with the curriculum, [or rote material] divorced from interesting problems."
"The language of mathematics speaks truths that are both practical and profound." (25 minutes)


Return to the Foundations 1 webpage