Breaking news from the battlefield of mind over matter. Just dig this:

Uh? What is it about, then? Well, this weekend's newspaper (somebody read it for me and passed on the snippet yesterday) featured an artical on some genuine Belgian genius who prepped himself towards this destiny by studying the odd mix of heavy math and in depth biology. He produced the above formula (in pole coordinates) which catches an enormous wealth of natural forms and shapes in a heavily reduced set of real numbers. Natural forms? Well yeah: flowers, an egg, snowflakes, crystals, the spiral of a shelve, the patterns in the sunflower, the nest of a yellow weaver. The possible effect of this knowledge on getting a grip on morphogenesis, bandwith economics (imagine communicating the shape of a flower in just a handful of real numbers), computer aided design (randomizing the parameters produces new forms at an incredible rate, designers just pick one from there in stead of needing to come up with one themselves), and thus to art, architecture, etc. is left to our shared imagination... Humanity just got a whole lot richer.

Beauty, elegance, simplicity, power,... It's almost frightening to see how this news got me totally excited. (let me know if it does the same to you). To help you in the process, some fast google-results: about his book | man's main web site | article in Nature | demo in svg (needs plugin) | short mentioning at ams.org | just me remembering alan turing's work on morphogenesis | article in science news | someone playing around with it