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THE FAMOUS MUSE PROBLEM:

There exists (in the firmament) 1 apollo, 3 graces and 9 muses. Each grace has a non intersecting set of 3 muses associated with her. Temple freezes are 2 dimensional, and typically isosceles triangles. Since apollo must be placed in the middle we must have a different number of muses and graces on each side thus breaking the symmetry so beloved of the Greeks. So the question is how do you lay out the gods in two dimensions (scupltors used concentric rings). The problem can of course be generalized. An n dimensional temple typically has (n-1) dimensional temple freezes. The n dimensional equivalent of Robert Graves book "The White Goddess" explains the heirarchy of n layers each containing n times the number of dieties as the previous layer. Trival solutions for spherical dieties in equilateral triangles in 3, 4 and 5 dimensions are shown below.

Three dimensions:

Four dimensions:

Five dimensions (It's obviously not possible to display a four dimensional freeze in three dimensions, this is an orthographic projection):

If you still have problems visualizing this there is a movie of it with a changing projections click here (964Kb).

If your (broken) windoze video codec couldn't handle that then you could try this version rendered at a princely 640x480. (745Kb).