Wolfram Blog : Minimum Inventory, Maximum Diversity: "A minimum inventory/maximum diversity system is a kit of modular parts and rules of assembly that gives you maximal design bang for your design-component buck. It’s a system that achieves a wide variety of effects from a small variety of parts. Nature excels at this game: every one of the many millions of natural proteins is assembled from an inventory of just 20 amino acids. Snowflakes are all just arrangements of the humble water molecule, H2O.
The same idea applies to the forms in the figure above, which are all constructed from semicircles joined at connection points evenly distributed along a vertical line. I stumbled onto this minimum inventory/maximum diversity system while playing with logo designs for a previous blog post, Exploring Logo Designs with Mathematica. The idea came from a logo for a concert hall by Peter Andermatt, approximated here:"
