In his Principia philosophiae (‘The Principles of Philosophy’, 1644), Descartes developed a vortex theory of planetary motion, by which he tried to understand the orbits of luminary and celestial phenomenons. This cartesian cosmology was illustrated by a map (illustration below) showing the vortex as a circling band containing luminary. Our solar system and the entire universe consist of a network of interlocking vortices, which are subject to gravitational and centrifugal powers.

In 1907, Georgy Voronoï used Gauss and Dirichlet observations (linking vortex theory to the quadratic forms) to create a method of statistic representation. Voronoï diagrams or Voronoï tessellations, which deals with networks of points, are fundamental in algorithmic geometry, that is to say processed by computers.