A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has closed a gap that sat unsolved in Erwin Schrödinger's theory of color perception for roughly 100 years. Led by Roxana Bujack, the researchers used geometry to formally define the "neutral axis" — the grayscale line from black to white that Schrödinger relied on but never defined mathematically, leaving his model incomplete.
Working with non-Riemannian geometry rather than the traditional Riemannian color space, the team derived the neutral axis directly from the geometry of color and corrected for the Bezold-Brücke effect, the way hues appear to shift as light intensity changes. Their conclusion: hue, saturation and lightness are not products of culture or experience but are built into the mathematical structure of how humans see color.
The work, published in Computer Graphics Forum and presented at the Eurographics Conference on Visualization, could sharpen color accuracy in photography, video and scientific data visualization. Team members included Emily N. Stark, Terece L. Turton, Jonah M. Miller and David H. Rogers.