History Overview – History of the High-Dimensional Volume Paradox

ho.history-overview

Inscribe an $n$-ball in an $n$-dimensional hypercube of side equal to 1, and let $n \rightarrow \infty$. The hypercube will always have volume 1, while it is a fun folk fact (FFF) that the volume of the ball goes to 0.

I first learnt of this in relation to Gromov. In the story I heard, he used to ask incoming students to compute the distance $(\sqrt{n}-1)/2$ from a hypercube corner to the ball, and observe them to see if they realized that the volume of the hypercube is concentrated in its corners.

Is this story correct? And is this the origin of this FFF? I could imagine a situation where several people noticed this at different times, but where the fact did not become "viral" until much more recenttly.

Best Answer

Brian Hayes wrote a column on the volume of the $n$-sphere for American Scientist a couple of years ago, available online here. It includes a bit of history, with bibliography, toward the end, which might be of help here.

Added 4/26/13: Here are a couple of pertinent passages from Brian's article:

"... Sommerville mentions the Swiss mathematician Ludwig Schläfli as a pioneer of n-dimensional geometry. Schläfli’s treatise on the subject, written in the early 1850s, was not published in full until 1901, but an excerpt translated into English by Arthur Cayley appeared in 1858. The first paragraph of that excerpt gives the volume formula for an n-ball, commenting that it was determined “long ago.” An asterisk leads to a footnote citing papers published in 1839 and 1841 by the Belgian mathematician Eugène Catalan."

and

"Not one of these early works pauses to comment on the implications of the formula—the peak at n=5 or the trend toward zero volume in high dimensions. Of the works mentioned by Sommerville, the only one to make these connections is a thesis by Paul Renno Heyl, published by the University of Pennsylvania in 1897."