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Why does the chromaticity diagram look like that?

I've always wanted to understand color theory, so I started reading about the XYZ color space which looked like it was the mother of all color spaces. I had no idea what that meant, but it was created in 1931 so studying 93-year old research seemed like a good place to start.

I'll spoil the answer but it might not make sense until you read this article: the shape comes from how our eyes perceive red, green, and blue relative to each other. They scientifically studied how our eyes mix RGB colors by sitting people down in a room with multiple light sources. So that's it: the shape is due to the XYZ color matching functions, which were derived from experiments that studied how our eyes perceive red, green, and blue light.

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