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Strange Spheres in Higher Dimensions - Numberphile

Strange Spheres in Higher Dimensions - Numberphile on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 2 separate months, 2020–2025.

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Matt Parker on Numberphile explains the strange properties of spheres in higher dimensions, such as how they poke out of their bounding boxes. It uses Pythagoras to build intuition for 4D and beyond.

Why Hacker News recommends it

Recommended whenever the counterintuitive geometry of high-dimensional spheres comes up, including in vector embedding discussions.

people recommended it
2
separate months
2
strong recommendations
0
discussed on HN
2020–2025
“Numberphile[2] has a video on higher dimensional spheres which talks about this weirdness.”
— magicalhippo, Feb 2020, in “Volume of a Sphere”

What HN commenters said

4 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.

ithkuilMay 2025Recommends

There is a good numberphile video about that ▶ this video It contains also a hilarious reference to the "parker circle:.

in “A visual exploration of vector embeddings” · View on HN

magicalhippoFeb 2020Recommends

Generalizations to higher dimensions[1] also have some fun properties. For one, the volume of a n-dimensional sphere (ball) goes to zero as n goes to infinity. But not in a trivial way: given a radius r, you can find the number of dimensions n that maximizes the volume of the n-sphere. For r=1 it's 5 dimensions, but for r=3 it's 55 dimensions. Numberphile[2] has a video on higher dimensional spheres which talks about this weirdness. [1]: [link] [2]: ▶ this video

in “Volume of a Sphere” · View on HN

hn_throwaway_99Oct 2021Cites it

Also not a topologist, but thought it was interesting after watching the video from the current top comment, ▶ this video , where if you look at the size of the "contained sphere", 4D is the only place where the contained sphere is exactly tangent to the containing box. Lower than that, and it's easy to visualize how the contained sphere is smaller, higher than that, the contained sphere is always bigger. So seems like it might be a natural consequence that techniques that work at higher or lower dimensions don't work for the case in 4D where the sphere is exactly tangent.

in “Tadayuki Watanabe disproved a major conjecture about spheres” · View on HN

ithinksoSep 2021Cites it

Oh they are very spike-y, well, my point in the above post is to just solve the eq but easier 'visualization' would be [0] By the way, this is a similar phenomena to the 'curse of dimensionality' [1] [0] ▶ this video [1] [link]

in “A mathematician's guided tour through higher dimensions” · View on HN

Topics & tags

Recreational & visual mathPure mathematicshypersphereshigher dimensionsnumberphilematt parkergeometry