Catz Fellow discovers new universal class of shapes

Professor Alain Goriely FRS, Catz Fellow and Professor of mathematical modelling at Oxford, was part of a team of mathematicians who discovered a new class of mathematical shapes called soft cells, answering how natural shapes can fit together to cover surfaces without gaps.

‘Nature not only abhors a vacuum, she also seems to abhor sharp corners’ explained Professor Alain Goriely.

Working with Professor Gábor Domokos, Krisztina Regős and Professor Ákos G. Horváth (Budapest University of Technology and Economics), Professor Goriely used CT images and other modelling tools to prove that ‘demonstrating that soft tilings are abundant in the combinatorial sense’ and to ‘demonstrate that these geometric shapes are strikingly reflected in natural examples, ranging from biological cells to the chambers of seashells, including the Nautilus.’ Their study ‘Soft cells and the geometry of seashells’ has been published by PNAS Nexus.

We congratulate Professor Goriely on this groundbreaking research.