That fact is betrayed by the the similarity of the shapes of atomic orbitals and the sensitivity patterns of Abisonic B-format channels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambisonics#Higher-order_ambiso...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital#Orbitals_table
...and the same patterns appear on the unit disk with the Zernike polynomials, used to describe optical aberrations and more.