Earlier quoted context omitted.
A classical particle (think a pebble) exists in 6 dimensions, 3 positions and 3 momenta. Nothing (in the classical, non-quantum) setting is solely determined by position coordinates.
I forgot most of the details already but as far as I remember, some classes of splines are 4 dimensional constructs that are then projected to 3 dimension to get your 3d spline curve.
Recently there has been super interesting research on using these nurbs as ansatzfunctions e.g. for FEM stuff. They got a lot of applications.