New Scientist:
September 26th, 2002
New Scientist: “Hidden
Tree” the secret of Zen garden.
Summary: A 500-year old Zen rock garden in Kyoto is almost entirely
empty, yet is almost subliminally pleasing to the eye, in the
same way that man-made
shapes echoing the Golden Ratio tend to seem harmonious. A similar
mathematical secret has just been discovered: the regions of symmetry,
when traced out, tend to draw a branched tree.
Is it just the CS geek in me, or are we looking at a half-millenium-old
Voronoi diagram?
More Voronoi links: a rigorous
definition courtesy MathWorld; path planning and
medial axis at Rice (I took Dr. Kavraki’s course while I was there);
an appled called VoroGlide;
another applet
at Cornell.