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Re:High-dimensional spheres are "spikey" by psykotic on Saturday May 19, 2012 @08:58PM (#3997577)
> which behaves very interestingly

Check out Bill Thurston's comment on why this is deeply misleading geometrically:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/53119/volumes-of-n-balls-w...

As several commenters there point out, if you must choose a ratio, a more geometrically natural choice would be the ratio of the unit sphere to its circumscribed cube (which decreases monotonically) or to its inscribed cube (which increases monotonically).

Re:High-dimensional spheres are "spikey" by tel on Saturday May 19, 2012 @09:51PM (#3997671)
As a demonstration of the non-intuitiveness of measures in high dimensions, I think this is still a decent example, no? I agree that n=5 [sic on my part above] isn't special, but seeing the Gamma function should be cause enough for worrying your intuition. It might be misleading, but I'd hope that it wouldn't beg the question of what's special about n=5, but instead what's wrong with your views about high dimensional space.

I agree with the comments on MathOverflow though.

Re:High-dimensional spheres are "spikey" by Drbble on Sunday May 20, 2012 @02:44AM (#3998147)