Twelve-year-old Milo Weinberg remembers the apple tree at Cambridge’s Tobin Montessori School like an old friend. He played around its trunk for years. He learned to ride his bike around it. And when ...

What makes a tree a tree? Or rather, why can we recognize trees in even quite abstract depictions when they are so varied in nature? Researchers have found a clue in the branches, and used math to ...

The math that describes the branching pattern of trees in nature also holds for trees depicted in art—and may even underlie our ability to recognize artworks as depictions of trees. The authors begin ...

Piet Mondrian painted the same tree in "The gray tree" (left) and "Blooming apple tree" (right). Viewers can readily discern the tree in "The gray tree" with a branch diameter scaling exponent of 2.8.