Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium on Square Bamboos and the Geometree (ISSBG 2022)

Conference Scope

The ISSBG 2022 symposium brought together botanists, biologists, technologists, physicists, applied mathematicians and geometers. Contributions spanned a wide range of subjects, but the common themes were:

  • Cutting-edge research on form and shape in geometry and in the natural sciences;
  • Transcending boundaries.

The target audience of this symposium was described as "those who wish to learn".

Geometree comes from a wonderful book - The Poetry of the Universe – by Robert Osserman: “We may picture the product of three thousand years of geometric inventiveness in the form of a tree – the “Geometree” - whose roots go back even further and whose branches represent the outcome of centuries of discovery and creation. With or without application, the branches and fruits of this tree are worth contemplating as a remarkable product of human imagination. The Geometree is healthy, vigorous and in full foliage, older than any redwood, and fully as majestic ”.

Square bamboos opened the door to a uniform and unified mathematical description of natural shapes. In 1993, superellipses were first used to describe the shape of square bamboos (Chimonobambusa species) and other square shapes in botany. Starfish and all that followed soon, through the generalization of Lamé curves to Gielis Transformations, as a uniform description of natural shapes and phenomena.