1_6 CULINARY SUGGESTION - GARLIC This is a garlic head baked in the oven. The cloves developed in the meristem and display a pseudo-hexagonal pattern. What technology can be inspired from this photo? The technology of baking garlic; it comes out delicious, not too strong. To all engineers: try it! Subject: Garlic head, Allium sativum, baked. Lens: Macro 90mm f/10. Theme 1: HEXAGONE +/- EPSILON While humans like squares, in biology the most common geometry for tesselating surfaces is by hexagons; this likely originates spontaneously by the packing of spherical cells over a plane. And when the surface has a curvature, complete covering is achieved by adding or removing sides, leading to a few pentagons or heptagons. I’m not sure what inspirations natural tessellations can provide; after all, covering by squares is much more efficient from a design and manufacturing perspective. And if we really need to cover a sphere with hexagons and pentagons, well, football balls have been devised already, long time ago. Anyway! Hexagons minimize the contour, as probably do pentagons and heptagons when the surface is curved. Are truly optimal if we need to place objects somewhere, like windmills. We may use the number of pentagons and heptagons to measure the curvature of a surface; sounds cumbersome but may provide a breakthrough somewhere. Truth here is, biological tessellations simply make for beautiful patterns to photograph.