Feb 27, 2026 12:43 AM
https://interestingengineering.com/scien...-completed
EXCERPTS: Researchers in the US have finally completed the missing mathematical pieces of theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s century-old color theory, based on his geometric model describing how humans perceive color.
In the 1920s, the Austrian-Irish scientist proposed a mathematical model of color perception based on visual response. He suggested that the full range of human-visible colors could be mapped as a three-dimensional geometric shape defined by cone-cell responses.
Now, a team of researchers led by Roxana Bujack, PhD, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), used advanced geometry to show that saturation, hue, and lightness aren’t shaped by culture or experience.
The scientists finalized Schrödinger’s model and showed that these attributes are built directly into the mathematical structure of human vision, and not just “in the eye of the beholder.”
“What we conclude is that these color qualities don’t emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself,” Bujack stated. She said the metric describes color differences as measurable geometric distances.
[...] Their work, presented at the Eurographics Conference on Visualization, represents a culmination of a project on color perception. The same project also delivered a pioneering study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Their current paper has been published in the Computer Graphics Forum, the official journal of the Eurographics Association... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: Researchers in the US have finally completed the missing mathematical pieces of theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s century-old color theory, based on his geometric model describing how humans perceive color.
In the 1920s, the Austrian-Irish scientist proposed a mathematical model of color perception based on visual response. He suggested that the full range of human-visible colors could be mapped as a three-dimensional geometric shape defined by cone-cell responses.
Now, a team of researchers led by Roxana Bujack, PhD, a computer scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), used advanced geometry to show that saturation, hue, and lightness aren’t shaped by culture or experience.
The scientists finalized Schrödinger’s model and showed that these attributes are built directly into the mathematical structure of human vision, and not just “in the eye of the beholder.”
“What we conclude is that these color qualities don’t emerge from additional external constructs such as cultural or learned experiences but reflect the intrinsic properties of the color metric itself,” Bujack stated. She said the metric describes color differences as measurable geometric distances.
[...] Their work, presented at the Eurographics Conference on Visualization, represents a culmination of a project on color perception. The same project also delivered a pioneering study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Their current paper has been published in the Computer Graphics Forum, the official journal of the Eurographics Association... (MORE - details)