{"id":174174,"date":"2023-10-14T02:28:59","date_gmt":"2023-10-14T07:28:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/this-mathematician-is-making-sense-of-natures-complexity"},"modified":"2023-10-14T02:28:59","modified_gmt":"2023-10-14T07:28:59","slug":"this-mathematician-is-making-sense-of-natures-complexity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/this-mathematician-is-making-sense-of-natures-complexity","title":{"rendered":"This mathematician is making sense of nature\u2019s complexity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/this-mathematician-is-making-sense-of-natures-complexity.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Best known for co-discovering the g\u00f6mb\u00f6c\u2014the first convex 3D shape with just two balancing points\u2014Domokos aims to understand the physical world by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry.<\/p>\n<p>He often begins new projects by concocting original ways to classify shapes. To prove that the g\u00f6mb\u00f6c existed before they found it, he and P\u00e9ter V\u00e1rkonyi introduced mathematically precise definitions of flatness and thinness. To categorize pebbles, Domokos counts their number of stable and unstable balancing points. And to describe tessellating patterns in rock cracks or nanomaterials, he calculates just two numbers: the average number of \u201ctiles\u201d meeting at each vertex in the \u201cmosaic\u201d and the average number of vertices per tile.<\/p>\n<p>The point is to find \u201ca new language\u201d to describe the shapes, says mathematician Krisztina Reg\u0151s, one of Domokos\u2019s graduate students. \u201cThe first thing that people do when they understand something: give it a name,\u201d Domokos says. \u201cAnd shapes don\u2019t have names.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Best known for co-discovering the g\u00f6mb\u00f6c\u2014the first convex 3D shape with just two balancing points\u2014Domokos aims to understand the physical world by describing its forms in the simplest possible geometry. He often begins new projects by concocting original ways to classify shapes. To prove that the g\u00f6mb\u00f6c existed before they found it, he and P\u00e9ter [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":578,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nanotechnology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/578"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}