The sunflower is the national symbol of the casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian war. This symbol was adopted because in August 2014 there were the most fierce battles in the sunflower fields. After these battles the flowers were already almost without petals and only with black seeds in the core.

So we were looking for an appropriate visualization for this symbol

What is to remember” project is a comprehensive cross-disciplinary study of existing practices of honoring the fallen soldiers in the Russo-Ukrainian war in Eastern Ukraine.

It involves a series of expert discussion panels, the publication of a book and website.

The sunflower is the national symbol of the casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian war. This symbol was adopted because in August 2014 there were the most fierce battles in the sunflower fields. After these battles the flowers were already almost without petals and only with black seeds in the core.

So we were looking for an appropriate visualization for this symbol.

We found a solution with the help of nature and mathematics, namely via the regularity of the Fermat’s spiral. Such regularity is common in natural shaping and underlies the structure of sunflower’s core.

Using a computer model of philotaxis, we generated several sunflower cores with the different number of seed points, according to the number of deaths over the years and months of the war.