SHAPE OF INNER SPACE

What if you were told that we actually live in a 10-dimensional universe—but that only 4 are accessible to our everyday senses? How do we account for the other 6 dimensions? What do they look like, where are they hiding, and what, if anything at all, do they do? According to theorists the missing six are curled up into bizarre structures known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. Shing-Tung Yau, the man who proved that these manifolds exist argues that not only is geometry fundamental to string theory, it is also fundamental to the nature of our Universe.

For more than twenty years, Shing-Tung Yau has played a pivotal role in the geometrical development of string theory. His influence spans across the field and his insights have profoundly affected the subject. And all this after he won the Fields Medal for his research in pure mathematics (research that has turned out to have
crucial implications for physics as well). Yau’s decades-long journey through geometry is a fascinating one and is a story that I feel will have wide appeal to the science-reading public.”—Brian Greene, Professor of Physics and Mathematics, Columbia University  

String theory says we live in a ten-dimensional universe, but that only four are accessible to our everyday senses. According to theorists, the missing six are curled up in bizarre structures known as Calabi-Yau manifolds. In The Shape of Inner Space, Shing-Tung Yau, the man who mathematically proved that these manifolds exist, argues that not only is geometry fundamental to string theory, it is also fundamental to the very nature of our universe.
Time and again, where Yau has gone, physics has followed. Now for the first time, readers will follow Yau’s penetrating thinking on where we’ve been, and where mathematics will take us next. A fascinating exploration of a world we are only just beginning to grasp, The Shape of Inner Space will change the way we consider the universe on both its grandest and smallest scales.