Thursday, November 20, 2008

Leonardo Pisano and the golden spiral...

No, this is not the beginning of some Italian children's book... It's the topic for something that has been of interest to me for several years. Something that an acquaintance about 5 years ago brought to my attention and I haven't been able to shake it off my mind since.

Leonardo's nick name was "Fibonacci" and was born in 1170, that's not a typo, it's documented fact... Long time ago eh? Anyhow Fibonacci being the math nut that he was linking numbers to nature. When someone asked him "why do you care about the numbers?" he replied "Someday these numbers will unlock the secrets of nature and will explain why a drone bee does not have a father."

Interestingly enough, Fibonacci's numbers can explain the design of many things from the shape of a rose to the spiral on the inside of a sunflower. But can it explain why we have two hands, three sections per finger, 5 digits per hand and 8 fingers?

The fine details of this are explained at http://goldennumber.net/ I couldn't possibly do it justice, you'll have to explore that for yourself but know that math explains a whole lot more than just how many taxes you owe to the great Caesar :)

There is beauty in numbers...

There is a perfect law of proportion in nature, while it may look random, nothing at all is random...

In this series of numbers each term is the sum of the previous two terms as follows:

0

1

1

2

3

5

8

13

21

34

55

89

etc.


The division of any two adjacent numbers gives the amazing Golden number e.g.
34 / 55 = 0.618 or inversely 55 /34 = 1.618.

This is called the Fibonacci series and for a guy who wrote this so long ago he's pretty frickin' spot on... We should listen to our elders more often eh?

And now, I must share with you some of the beautiful results of this math since math itself is quite ugly by comparison;

And now you see why I can't seem to shake this from my mind... :)


Cheers!

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