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