Dimension is not easy to understand. At the turn of the century it was one of the major problems in mathematics to determine what dimension means and which properties it has. And since then the situation has become somewhat worse because mathematicians have come up with some ten different notions of dimension: topological dimension, Hausdorff dimension, fractal dimension, self-similarity dimension, box-counting dimension, capacity dimension, information dimension, Euclidean dimension, and more. They are all related. Some of them, however, make sense in certain situations, but not at all in others, where alternative definitions are more helpful. Sometimes they all make sense and are the same. Sometimes several make sense but do not agree. The details can be confusing even for a research mathematician.
April 30, 2007
