Asklemmy

48788 readers

723 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Everyone talks about the 4th dimension, BUT why is 3D geometry so hard for the average person compared to 2D ? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

46 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I think 3D geometry has a lot of quirks and has so many results that un_intuitively don't hold up. In the link I share a discussion with ChatGPT where I asked the following:

assume a plane defined by a point A=(x_0,y_0,z_0), and normal vector n=(a,b,c) which doesn't matter here, suppose a point P=(x,y,z) also sitting on the space R^3. Question is:
If H is a point on the plane such that (AH) is perpendicular to (PH), does it follow immediately that H is the projection of P on the plane ?

I suspected the answer is no before asking, but GPT gives the wrong answer "yes", then corrects it afterwards.

So Don't we need more education about the 3D space in highschools really? It shouldn't be that hard to recall such simple properties on the fly, even for the best knowledge retrieving tool at the moment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] vipaal@aussie.zone 3 points 1 day ago

I think adding a bit of curvature to the six surfaces of a regular cube can throw off many. Then there's scale. Astronomical scales and milli or micro meter scales adds its own complexity by the simple fact that we lack regular language tools to capture the ideas and express them completely.

Where do we see curved surfaces? Everywhere from flight routes to space flight to deep sea diving.

Though I am not all tbat clear where we apply 3d geometry at micro scale or smaller, just a hunch that we may need them.

Language plays catch up. Is.