The periodic table of mathematical shapes is popular name given to a project to classify Fano varieties. The project was thought up by Professor Alessio Corti, from the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. It aims to categorise all three-, four- and five-dimensional shapes into a single table, analogous to the periodic table of chemical elements. It is meant to hold the equations that describe each shape and, through this, mathematicians and other scientists expect to develop a better understanding of the shapes’ geometric properties and relations.
It is estimated that 500 million shapes can be defined algebraically in four dimensions, and a few thousand more in the fifth. The project has already won the Philip Leverhulme Prize—worth £70,000—from the Leverhulme Trust.