Now that's some fucking math...

I'm currently reading The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. It attempts to be an entry-level introduction to modern superstring theory and contemporary quantum mechanics, and so far I have found it quite enjoyable and accessible, especially considering that I am not a physicist by training. As I was in bed tonight reading about the possibilities of there being more than the three commonly observed spatial dimensions, I came across a passage that had the following footnote:

For the mathematically inclined reader we note that a Calabi-Yau manifold is a complex Kähler manifold with vanishing first Chern class. In 1957 Calabi conjectured that every such manifold admits a Ricci-flat metric, and in 1977 Yau proved this to be true...we note that this particular Calabi-Yau space is a real three-dimensional slice through the quintic hypersurface in complex projective four-space.

It's a good thing that I took that multi-dimensional topology class as a pass/no record back in grad school. Yeah. I have to make sure I work "quintic hypersurface" into more everyday conversations.