In my never-ending quest for finding geometry in nature, I recently found a star-tetrahedron in the flowers of a Hoya pubicalyx ‘Red Buttons.’ Here are the flowers:
The star-tetrahedron is a three-dimensional figure, represented in two dimensions thusly:
The flowers create a three-dimensional ball, so if I could wrap a three-dimensional star-tetrahedron around the flower ball, I’d be willing to bet that everything would line up almost perfectly.
Since I can’t do that, I have to settle for a two-dimensional picture of the hoya flowers and a two-dimensional representation of a star-tetrahedron. But, with special thanks to Photoshop, everything lines up pretty nicely when I superimpose that star-tetrahedron representation on top of the two-dimensional picture of the flowers:
It’s too late to put this in my book, Nature’s Geometry: Succulents, but it’s not too late to put it in my Powerpoint presentation for the cactus & succulent clubs that I will be talking to next year.
Russel Ray Photos 