[monkmartinez]

At first glance the "masterpieces" looked like a crap ton of lines and circles around a sketched shell or butterfly. You know, the kind you see when you tell Stable Diffusion to "sketch". Then I watched the video for a sec... WOAH!!! He is talking about a "formula" quite a bit... ctrl-f "formula" == 0 results.

Google: Rafael Araujo artist formula. Ahhhh! https://www.rafael-araujo.com/calculation

Now we are getting somewhere... and another that shows the process a bit better: https://hazelhomeartandantiques.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-cal...

Now I am trawling github to see if I can find some processing or similar libraries that I can play around with. Golden Ratio sketches, defining physical objects and shapes from purely mathematical constructions... I love rabbit holes!

[nequals30]

Inigo Quilez has some good videos generating art and scenes with just mathematical constructions:

https://www.youtube.com/c/InigoQuilez

[openrisk]

Would be very pleasantly surprised if a drawing like "Blue Spikes Shell" is actually reducible to a readable mathematical construction.

A surface that exhibits very strong variability in curvature (like the spikes in the shell) is most likely a collage of different pieces. These would (at best) have only a locally valid mathematical formula. Achieving a visually convincing result through smooth patching introduces lots of ugly "numbers".

Most likely the "formula" concerns only some aspects of the drawing, like overall symmetry and relative sizes.

[sixtyj]

This is a deep rabbit hole indeed :)

Does Donald Knuth have any metaprogramming for golden section/ratio?

About golden section in the universe there is a nice book by Scott Olsen - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/316282.The_Golden_Sectio...