And now, the mathematics of pasta shapes

“I play around with Mathematica a lot,” he said. “We were eating pasta, and I was wondering how easy these shapes would be recreated” with the software.

So that evening after dinner, Mr. Huisman figured out the five lines or so of Mathematica computer code that would generate the shape of the pasta he had been eating — gemelli, a helixlike twist — and a dozen others. “Most shapes are very easy to create indeed,” he said.

(NYTimes via io9)