Geometric Gastronomy

The Mathematical Structure of Flavor, Pairing, and Culinary Harmony

Andrew H. Bond
Senior Member, IEEE · Department of Computer Science · San Jose State University

Spring 2026 · Book 12 of the Geometric Series

Flavor perception, ingredient pairing, recipe construction, and culinary traditions all exhibit geometric structure — vectors in receptor space, manifolds of balance, transformations under cooking, and cultural attractors in flavor space. This book develops the mathematical framework and shows it unifies empirical findings across food science, neuroscience, and computational gastronomy.

Outline complete · drafting underway

Part I: The Flavor Space (Ch. 1–3)

  1. Chapter 1: Taste as Geometry
  2. Chapter 2: The Receptor Basis
  3. Chapter 3: Dimensionality and Perceptual Compression

Part II: The Geometry of Pairing (Ch. 4–6)

  1. Chapter 4: Complementarity vs. Similarity
  2. Chapter 5: Flavor Networks and Molecular Pairing
  3. Chapter 6: Balance as Simplex Constraint

Part III: The Geometry of Cooking (Ch. 7–9)

  1. Chapter 7: Cooking as Transformation on Flavor Space
  2. Chapter 8: Maillard, Fermentation, and Emergent Dimensions
  3. Chapter 9: Recipes as Paths Through Ingredient Manifolds

Part IV: Computational Gastronomy (Ch. 10–12)

  1. Chapter 10: Cuisines as Cultural Attractors
  2. Chapter 11: Flavor Embeddings and PCA-Matryoshka
  3. Chapter 12: Generative Recipes and the Novelty Frontier

Part V: Applications (Ch. 13–14)

  1. Chapter 13: Personalized Flavor and Individual Geometry
  2. Chapter 14: What Gastronomy Teaches the General Theory