[acjohnson55]

I agree with you. I used to think of working with color mathematically, until I started researching how color perception actually works. I was working in an imaging science lab at the time. That made me realize how difficult it is to come up with any sort of mathematical approach to creating a color scheme.

It's much better to find color schemes that are recommended by experienced designers. And if you're working on a diagram, trying to design it to be effective with some large number of colors is probably futile, if color is going to be the sole visual discriminant. It's better to keep your number of elements small, if you can. And if you can't, pick a small number of colors, and combine them with textures to get a larger number of combinations.