Next time you’re on a hike or taking the scenic route on a road trip, pay attention to how often the shape of a hexagon is present in nature.
From honeybees constructing their beehives with hexagonal cells, snowflake’s molecular structure consisting of mini hexagons, to the pattern of a turtle’s shell or fish scales makes hexagons an integral shape in nature.
The reason for this is not a coincidence. It is a result of fundamental physical properties and evolutionary optimization. For example, nature tends to find the most energy-efficient solutions. Hexagonal structures often represent the lowest energy state for many systems, making them naturally occurring and stable. That is why you find hexagons in chemical bonds and equations in chemistry textbooks, and why the tissues in plants and organisms are organized into hexagonal patterns in order to allow efficient packing of cells and distribution of resources. In physics, the hexagonal structure distributes forces evenly across its surface, providing strength and stability – hence why turtles and honeycombs utilize this structure.
This six-sided polygon has intrigued mathematicians, scientists, and designers for centuries, and for good reason. As a shape alone, hexagons are one of 3 polygons that can fit together perfectly without any gaps, along with triangles and squares. When it comes to dividing a plane into regions of equal area with the least total perimeter, hexagons win. This concept is actually known as the “honeycomb conjecture” which was mathematically proven in 1999.
Inspired from these beautiful yet structurally integral shapes found in nature, the applications for hexagonal designs are powerful and expanding. This six-sided shape is proving to be useful in cutting-edge technology from nanomaterials to space habitats. For example, Graphene is a cingle layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, and it is revolutionizing material science due to its flexibility and excellent conduction of heat and electricity. And within Space habitats, cells are shaped as hexagons because the shape optimizes the amount of sunlight captured with the least amount of wasted space between cells. This only begins to explain how this shape is being used to study and optimize engineering within other fields like quantum computing, metaphysics, and aerospace engineering as well.
As we study the power of hexagon shapes in nature, we are inspired to innovate scientific and technological domains by incorporating this profound geometry into our engineering designs.
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