In mathematics the fourth dimension, or a four-dimensional ("4D") space, is an abstract concept, obtained by taking the rules of our three-dimensional space and generalizing them to a space with one more dimension. It has been studied by mathematicians and philosophers for almost two hundred years, both for its own interest and for the insights it offered into mathematics and related fields.
The fourth dimension in this space was sometimes interpreted as time, but this is no longer done in modern physics. In the last century spacetime was developed, which unifies space and time but with a different metric so the time dimension is treated differently from Euclidean space. The resulting space is a Minkowski space and is usually studied separately from the space described here.
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