2-D Diagrams LO4357

JOHNWFIELD@aol.com
Wed, 20 Dec 1995 07:25:07 -0500

Replying to LO4343 --

Well, I can believe that it helps to do 3D things, but why not do n-D
things.

A lot of the myopia relating to dimensionality is trapped in the old idea,
constantly reborn, that there are just four dimensions, the 3 spatial and
the 1 temporal.

This idea was pretty well destroyed intellectually by Willard Gibbs in
developing physical chemistry.

Still the basic destruction rests on knowing what a dimension is.

The most fundamental theory of dimensionality rests on the DeMorgan-Peirce
theory of relations, and it has been pretty well demonstrated that this is
the case by the British mathematician at the University of Essex in his
development of Q-Analysis in the 1970s, while studying representation of
urban environments.

>From the practitioner point of view, my two papers add some practicality to
it:

JNW(1986), "Dimensionality", Proc. 1986 International Conference on
Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 2, New York: IEEE, 1118-1121.

JNW and Alexander Christakis (1987) Systems Research 4(2), 127-137.

We are looking forward to the day when the systems research community
manages to put its nose under the tent of the business-oriented gurus, and
gets their attention long enough to let them know of its existence (the
community and the nose).

--
John Warfield
Johnwfield@aol.com