In the 17th century the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes built a bridge between the algebraic and geometric realms when he devised the Cartesian system of coordinates. (He also classified six primitive passions: wonder and love, hatred and desire, sadness and joy.)

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Süss — occupying three-dimensional space, defined by the coordinates x, y and z — also incorporates a more recent concept: “extreme points,” or “singularities,” which are their own subject of study in the field of algebraic geometry.

“If you look at the shape of the heart, you will see one peak on the bottom, and another peak on the top,” said Andreas Daniel Matt, a mathematician and the director at Imaginary. (The peak at the top is indented.)

In general, a singularity typically corresponds to a jump in an otherwise continuous process. In physics, it’s a point with an infinite value. The Big Bang singularity is the biggest singularity in the history of the universe. In general relativity, a singularity is the heart of a black hole from which one would never emerge.

A “naked singularity,” by contrast, would be more forgiving (although it’s not thought to actually exist in nature). “Roughly, a naked singularity is one you could fall into and you could escape from,” said Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford, who has an article on singularity theorems in the forthcoming book “Topology and Physics.”