Nature by the Numbers

PUBLISHED ON

March 26, 2010

Today’s YouTube treasure is neither particularly humorous nor stop-motion-animation-y. But what it lacks in those departments, it more than makes up for with its high “math geek” quotient and sheer mind-blowing awesomeness:

Cristóbal Vila, the man behind the short, has a fascinating website documenting the ideas and process behind his creation:

Artists and architects have used since ancient times many geometrical and mathematical properties: we could take some examples simply by observing the refined use of the proportions by architects from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome or other Renaissance artists like Michelangelo, Da Vinci or Raphael.

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But what is more surprising for me is that many of these properties and mathematical developments are also found present in NATURE. We could find countless cases, but I wanted to refer only three of them on this short animation: The Fibonacci Series and Spiral/The Golden and Angle Ratios/The Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations.

(The WiP page is great fun, as well.)

Author

  • Joseph Susanka has been doing development work for institutions of Catholic higher education since his graduation from Thomas Aquinas College in 1999. Currently residing in Lander, Wyoming — “where Stetsons meet Birkenstocks” — he is a columnist for Crisis Magazine and the Patheos Catholic portal.

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