Branching out: the team says it is the first demonstration of Voronoi diagrams in plant venation patterns. Left: a leaf of the Chinese money plant. Right: A computer model of a Voronoi diagram that traces the leaf’s central “pores” and looping reticulate veins. (Courtesy: Navlakha lab/CSHL) Researchers in the US and Canda have discovered a naturally occurring “Voronoi pattern” in the Chinese money plant . Voronoi diagrams were introduced in the 1600s by French philosopher René Descartes and are named after the Russian mathematician Georgy Voronoi, who defined and studied them in the early 1900s. Voronoi diagrams are geometric patterns used to divide space into regions. The plane is divided up into tessellating polygons, known as cells, that each contain a “seed” point. Every location inside a cell is closer to its seed than any other seed in a neighbouring cell.…