Nepal’s flag comes with geometry instructions
It’s the only national flag that isn’t a rectangle, and Nepal’s constitution explains how to draw it, step by step, like a geometry exercise.
Almost every national flag is a rectangle. Nepal’s is two crimson pennants stacked on top of each other, edged in blue, with a white moon in the upper one and a white sun in the lower. It’s the only national flag that isn’t a quadrilateral, and the only one taller than it is wide.
A flag you construct
When the modern flag was adopted on 16 December 1962, the constitution didn’t just describe it. It gave a step-by-step geometric construction: draw a line of a given length, measure along it, join these points, draw an arc from here. It reads like a school geometry problem, and mathematicians and programmers have enjoyed following it ever since.
Follow the steps and you get a shape whose width-to-height ratio is irrational: roughly 1:1.219. No simple fraction describes it.
What it means
The double pennant is often linked to the Himalayas, or to the two main religions, Hinduism and Buddhism. A popular reading says the moon stands for peace and the sun for hard work, and that together they express the hope that Nepal will last as long as the sun and moon. These are interpretations rather than official definitions.
Bring it up
“Nepal’s flag is the only one in the world that isn’t a rectangle, and its proportions are an irrational number.”
