A computer-generated Voronoi pattern had an 82 percent match with the pattern found in sea urchin skeletons. This arrangement, the team suspects, yields a strong yet lightweight skeletal structure.

Artist and neurobiologist Alan Rorie's Kickstarter offers the opportunity to design your own bookshelf based on the Voronoi pattern, a clever method of subdividing space into polyhedrons.

In the 1854 London cholera epidemic, physician John Snow used a Voronoi diagram created from the locations of water pumps, counting the deaths in each polygon to identify a particular pump as the ...