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Person

Giacomo Maraldi

A man with curly dark hair and a beard wears a brown jacket with a white ruffled collar, reminiscent of historical European attire.

Italian-French astronomer (1665–1729), nephew of Cassini and a fixture at the Paris Observatory. Best remembered for cataloguing stars and observing Mars, he also turned his instruments on bees. In 1712 he measured the rhombic angles at the back of honeycomb cells and found them remarkably consistent at about 109.47 degrees, prompting later mathematicians to ask whether the angle was the optimal one.

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