Resumen de Throwing shapes
Edwin Abbott, in his 1884 book Flatland, created a fictional 2D landscape full of lines, triangles, squares and circles that have no notion of up or down. One day, a 3D Sphere visits Flatland and whisks away a Square to a higher dimensional world. Square learns that Flatlanders are mere 2D projections of 3D beings. He then has the audacity to suggest that Sphere may be a shadow too--of a shape in four dimensions. Henry Markram thinks we might be suffering from a similarly bunkered perspective when considering the workings of our own brains. He and his colleagues of the Blue Brain Project at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne have been using algebraic topology, a field of mathematics used to characterize higher-dimensional shapes, to explore the workings of the brain. Here, Ananthaswamy features the structures of the brain and its function using higher dimensions.
