N-dim Involvment LO7436

JOHNWFIELD@aol.com
Wed, 15 May 1996 07:42:38 -0400

Replying to LO7410 --

In a message dated 96-05-13 23:08:44 EDT, you write:

>I have been successful on ocasion-in getting more than 4 dimensions of
>information on a 2 dimensional piece of paper (or computer screen), but
>theres still more "art" to doing that than finite technique.

I'm familiar with Tufte's very popular book. While broad in scope, Tufte
does nothing with the representation of logical patterns.

In my book A SCIENCE OF GENERIC DESIGN I present what I call "Field" and
"Profile" representations. These representations satisfy the property of
being "open at scale"; i.e., they do not lose either abruptly or at all
their capacity to represent as the scale of the topic grows.

A superficial look at these will suggest that they are very commonplace
kinds of things. A deeper look will convince you that there is a sound
basis for saying that these are n-dimensional representations.

In the early 1970's a professor of math at the Univ. of Essex developed
what he called q-analysis, and published two books illustrating his
concept of how to portray social systems in mathematical terms. In one of
these he shows the linkage between the discrete mathematics and the
continuum mathematics, and provides the essential connection between the
discrete (field/option/etc) types of representations and the continuum.

Grossly speaking, Tufte's approach is the graphics of continua; and mine
is the graphics of discrete spaces. As you probably know, differential
calculus deals with the limiting aspects of discrete phenomena. There is
a corresponding graphical connection.

John N. Warfield
Johnwfield@aol.com

-- 

JOHNWFIELD@aol.com

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