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In The Shape of Inner Space, Shing-Tung Yau and Steve Nadis fight string theory’s corner by explaining multidimensional geometry

HERE’S a sentence you don’t read every day: “‘My pleasure,’ she said, smiling coquettishly and curling up into a Calabi-Yau shape.”

It’s safe to say that few of The New Yorker‘s readers would have known what Woody Allen was on about when he wrote that in July 2003. Allen probably didn’t know either. In case you’re wondering, the geometric form known as a Calabi-Yau space (see picture) exists in multiple dimensions and is the pedestal on which string theory has been…