Voronoi Olympics
I was browsing through MSNBC.com (the CNN.com clone) this morning, looking at some of the pictures of the Chinese Olympics facilities, and lo and behold, I came across this picture of the aquatics center:
The pattern on the wall is called a Voronoi diagram, and is formed by taking a bunch of random points, and dividing the space into regions that are closest to a particular point. The boundaries are lines that are equidistant between two points.
The ceiling of the aquatics center uses the same technique:
Who knew?!
July 30th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Almost, but not quite.
I’ll agree that the pattern is a tessellation composed entirely of convex polyhedra, but that’s not sufficient for a Voronoi diagram, which you define as having edges equidistant from two points. In the exterior shot I can see a particular set of three adjacent cells which could not be formed with the equidistant constraint. (As noted in the Wikipedia article, a slice of a 3-D Voronoi diagram is composed entirely of convex polyhedra, but is not itself a Voronoi diagram.)
July 30th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
See?! Now Chris is a Voronoi Olympian.
I just spent the last half hour scaling that image so that it would be a direct side-view of the building, so we could all stare at it.
Fortunately the Gimp crashed, so this post was spared some serious nerdliness.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Wikipedia actually has an article about the Beijing National Aquatics Center. It turns out that it isn’t a Voronoi diagram after all; it is a slice through a Weaire-Phelan foam.
Or something.