Measuring Shape

Introduction

Some Background

Shape is an elusive concept. Humans depend on the recognition of shapes for many purposes, but find shapes hard to describe in words. Like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s description of pornography, “I know it when I see it,” We can’t always communicate what we see to someone else, “It’s shaped kind of like a thing-a-ma-bob but with a smaller whatchamacallit and no dingus.” Dryden (1998) defines “shape” as “all the geometrical information that remains when location, scale and rotational effects are filtered out from an object.” But that negative philosophical declaration does not tell how to describe the “information that remains.”

Many artists have explored the relationships between objects in the world ...