14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists based at the Rockefeller University in New York say that mathematics and geometric patterns are present in the natural world in unexpected forms. They apparently connect structure to function in leaves, which may help explain why the latter are so beautiful.
It's important to note here that the human brain tends to interpret beauty as coming from symmetry. The wonderful patterns on the surface of leaves appear so gracious and wonderful to us because they have structure, an underlying pattern that makes them grow in a specific arrangement.
Apparently, this structure is also connected to their function. For instance, the branching arrangement of leaf veins is extremely important for allowing the leaf to survive if it is pierced by an object or creature. Nutrient transport is simply rerouted through other channels, bypassing the affected area.
For their new study, investigators used time-lapse photography and a special, fluorescent dye to see how nutrients are transported within leaves. The goal of this investigation was to figure out the mathematical formulas governing the way plants work.
Scientists constantly turn to Mother Nature for inspiration, since the world around us has had several billion years at its disposal to optimize all of its systems to their top potential. Arguably, optimizing form with function is what nature does best.
“If you begin looking at them in any degree of detail, you will see all of those beautiful arrangements of impinging angles and where the big veins meet the little veins and how well they are arranged,” RU mathematical physicist Marcelo Magnasco says.
He and physicist Eleni Katifori, also at RU, used grant money from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate the presence of geometric patterns in the architecture of leaves.
Their primary focus was leaf vasculature, the arrangement of veins within veins that enables the entire structure to withstand a massive amount of damage before succumbing. “Something that looks pretty looks pretty for a really good reason,” Magnasco explains.
“It has a well defined and elegant function. We can scan the leaves at extremely high resolution and reconstruct every single little piece of vein, who talks to who, who is connected to who and so forth,” the expert goes on to say .
“It was very hard to get to a unique way of actually enumerating how they are ordered. Then we hit on the idea that what we should do is start at the very bottom, counting all of the individual little loops,” he adds.
The conclusions this study yielded may be used to understand a number of natural systems in more detail than ever before, including neural networks, malignant tumors and river systems, among others.