Spiral disk packings

It is shown that van Iterson's metric for disk packings, proposed in 1907 in the study of a centric model of spiral phyllotaxis, defines a bounded distance function in the plane. This metric is also related to the bifurcation of Voronoi tilings for logarithmic spiral lattices, through the continued fraction expansion of the divergence angle. The phase diagrams of disk packings and Voronoi tilings for logarithmic spirals are dual graphs to each other. This gives a rigorous proof that van Iterson's diagram in the centric model is connected and simply connected. It is a nonlinear analog of the duality between the phase diagrams for disk packings and Voronoi tilings on the linear lattices, having the modular group symmetry.