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Comment by eh_why_not | Hacker News Reader

Looking past Nature magazine's unnecessarily fancy/clickbait title, the original work's [0] title is "Soft cells and the geometry of seashells".

[0] https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae311/77546...

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It's also funny that while the title uses the baity word "discover", the very first paragraph merely claims the mathematicians "described" the shapes.

I know that in newspapers and magazines, editors write headlines rather than authors to get clicks, regardless of accuracy. I would have thought Nature would try to be better though...

Maybe a tad philosophical/pedantic but many mathematicians follow the "Mathematical realism" approach and would say that any new mathematics be it simply describing existing shapes is actually a form of discovery in the world of mathematics

Reminds me of those stupid Lipozene ads circa 2012:

"Researchers have now discovered a capsule that helps reduce this 'body fat', and control your weight."

Honestly, the observation seems novel enough to me that the term discovery is appropriate. We say that Darwin discovered evolution and Newton discovered gravity. Both these phenomenon were previously observed but it took a genius to consider what they were in essence. Same with this work - look at the photographs of the mollusk, river, and onion. I would have never connected those dots.

The Nature empire is just another click bait factory.

The actual discovery seems to be buried in the midsection

>…suspected that the actual 3D chamber had no corners at all. “That sounded unbelievable,” says Domokos. “But later we found that she was right.”

Fwiw its also not obvious from the main paper, you have to look at fig 7 d-e for an idea

So in this case, i’d place some of the blame on the mathematicians themselves for failure to properly follow up on the bait. (But nature shall not be absolved from holding them to a higher standard)

I was thinking about how incredibly funny it would be if it was something mundane like the cube.

It's pretty egregious clickbait for Nature -- more along the lines of what I'd expect from Forbes or a similar outfit.

I mean, the title is saying that they "discovered" the "new class of shape" featured in this old kitchen tile: https://www.contemporist.com/reasons-why-you-should-get-crea...

Come on, now. The Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were surely aware of it, and used similar pointed/curved and lenticular shapes in art and design.

>Domokos and colleagues devised an algorithm for smoothly converting geometric tiles — either 2D polygons or 3D polyhedra, like the bubbles of a foam — into soft cells, and explored the range of possible shapes these rules permit. In 2D, the options are fairly limited: all tiles must have at least two cusp-like corners.

(Emphasis mine)

Am I reading that wrong or are the kitchen tiles in the images impossible based on the statement above

That shape has three cusp-like corners -- one at each sharp point, with smooth curves (convex/concave) between them. This satisfies the "at least two" condition.

The even simpler "lemon" is an even more egregious example, as it satisfies the conditions in two and three dimensions and yet is rather old and well-defined: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/LemonSurface.html

I think that tile shape has one cusp-like corner and two ~90-degree corners. Thus it's not a complete transformation of a polygon into a soft cell, and hence the "at least two" rule doesn't apply.

They aren't 90° corners -- and in any case it would be simple to modify the angle of those corners and keep the shape basically (or nearly) the same.

Also the plain 2D lemon/lozenge/lentil satisfies all conditions.

Taken from the ancient tongue twister: soft cells and seashells by the sea shore.

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