Beauty & Variation

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Liquids and solids can also be described as supershapes, including the shapes of snowflakes. In “On Growth and Form”, D’Arcy Thompson writes: “So the living and the dead, things animate and inanimate, we dwellers in the world and this world wherein we dwell are bound alike by physical and mathematical law”.There is indeed also a relationship with the world-at-large “wherein we dwell” since from a formal point of view there is a connection between flowers and plants on the one hand, and certain space-time models on the other.

The geometrical description of curves and surfaces and the shapes that are derived via Gielis-transformations, describe and determine in a uniform and universal way an enormous diversity of natural shapes.
Lamé’s initial approach to crystallography using superellipses, Piet Hein’s supereggs, the shape of bamboo culms, bird eggs, starfish and shells, DNA-molecules and flowers, pollen grains of plants and even galaxies and space-time models, all do assume shapes with similar geometrical formal descriptions.