An anonymous reader writes: The National Aquatics Center in Beijing, newly built for the Olympics, is a glowing cube of bubbles. The walls, roof and ceiling of the "Water Cube" are covered — indeed, made from — enormous bubbles that seem to have drifted into place randomly, as if floating on the surface of a pool.
But of course, those bubbles hardly skittered there of their own free will. Creating this frothy confection took a lot of steel, a lot of manpower, and not least, a lot of fancy mathematics.
The building's designers wanted the foam to look random and organic. But for the engineering to be practical, it had to have some underlying order. So Tristram Carfrae, an engineer at Arup, the Australian engineering firm on the project, looked into the mathematics of foam. He found what he needed — and he also uncovered a wonderful mathematical story dating back to the 1800s.
