Without The Internet

I would never have heard of this. I'm not saying I understand anything, but at least I can recognize the reference if I ever see it again.

There are two inspirations for the design of the Water Cube. The exterior surface is a bubble-like skin of translucent plastic, arrayed as Voronoi polygons drawn from seemingly random points. Gregory Voronoi was a 19th-century Ukrainian mathematician who studied what we now call computational geometry. Voronoi studied what happens when you throw points at a plane and then break the plane into regions where each region is the area that is closest to its point. This creates a natural polygonal division of the plane. You see this pattern very clearly in the polygonal patterns of light, known technically as caustics, that play across the bottom of a well-lit pool or pond. Voronoi polygon patterns are also found on giraffes and in the veins in leaves. I made a recursive Voronoi fractal for one of the staircases in my house.