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Computer program 'paints' porphyrin structures in the style of Piet Mondrian (chemistryworld.com)
53 points by crescit_eundo 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



This is a really neat way of visualising molecules!

Just to be incredibly boring and pedantic though- I love mondrian's works and he's an artist who constantly experimented. It's kind of a shame that he's often thought of and talked about as if all his paintings were random grids of random colours.

Even his really grid based paintings (which to be fair is like the whole second half if his career) often do interesting things with outlines and space that make them much more interesting than random grids:

- https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Piet_Mondrian#/media/Fi...

- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Piet_Mon...


The publication, with more pics: https://doi.org/10.1002/ange.202403754


I was surprised that such a distinctive word shares its root with words for diverse things - philosophy and minerals, along with the topic of this thread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=intitle%3A%22Por...


> porphyrin

For context that's a class of molecules which includes the "heme" of human hemoglobin.

Reading the title, I was reminded of the disorder Porphyria [0], which is memorable for being similar to some vampire myths.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porphyria


Very nice idea.

Not sure how the paintings correspond to the molecular structure, but it may be helpful to chemistry engineers who have some better intuition about molecules than me.





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