I’m a math geek, so this might be more up my alley than most.
That said, every so often, I encounter some basic mathematical concept embedded in nature. This particular story involves the Fibonacci Sequence:
– 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …
Each term is the sum of the two previous terms. The Fibonacci Sequence crops up in all sorts of places. For example, if you pick up a pine cone and start counting the number of petals (bracts) at each level, it will exactly follow the Fibonacci sequence. Lots and lots of examples of this in nature.
This tweet offers another example, one I’ve not seen before. Basically, you can use the Fibonacci Sequence to convert miles to kilometers and back again.
Crazy, right? If this sort of thing interests you, take a look at the spiral pictures on the Fibonacci number Wikipedia page. Some spooky geeky stuff there.
Or maybe not?
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm
http://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/devlin_05_07.html
“Basically, you can use the Fibonacci Sequence to convert miles to kilometers and back again.
Crazy, right?” Maybe to you Americans who don’t use the Metric system but most of us have known about that since we were kids being taught Metric. 🙂
Also, as Wikipedia said, at the link, “Yellow Chamomile
head showing the arrangement in 21 (blue) and 13 (aqua) spirals. Such
arrangements involving consecutive Fibonacci numbers appear in a wide
variety of plants.”
The “sequence” is there in the sense of there being two consecutive numbers from it; but that’s hardly surprising given the way concentric circles composed of unit-sized entities naturally work – as the first link more or less says.
Not spooky at all.
(Also, he Fibonacci number for pine cones is likewise two adjacent numbers, not a larger piece of it, and only for count of spirals, not number of petals per level – and not all pine species display even that!
Anyone who’s actually looked at pinecones shouldn’t buy that “petals per level” claim; do an image search and try to make it work …)
But the miles/kilometers thing isn’t like the pine cone thing.
The connection between the Fibonacci series and things like pine cones and sunflowers in probably overstated. But, to the extent there is a connection, it reflects a real correspondence between biological growth and mathematics. (The geometric spiral is both closely related to the Fibonaccis and to some kinds of biologic growth, so it’s not a huge surprise.)
The mile/kilometers thing, on the other hand, is simply due to chance. The ratio of adjacent Fibonaccis asymptotically approaches the golden mean, which is about 1.618. The ratio of a mile to a kilometer happens to be about 1.609, so using the golden mean (or an approximation of it) is probably good enough.