![]() ![]() Spirals are common in plants, with Fibonacci spirals making up over 90% of the spirals. ![]() Named after the Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci, this sequence forms the basis of many of nature's most efficient and stunning patterns. Whether it is the vast swirl of a hurricane or the intricate spirals of the DNA double-helix, spirals are common in nature and most can be described by the famous mathematical series the Fibonacci sequence. This negates a long-held theory about the evolution of plant leaf spirals, indicating that they evolved down two separate evolutionary paths. Instead, the ancient plants were found to have another type of spiral. The findings indicate that the arrangement of leaves into distinctive spirals, that are common in nature today, were not common in the most ancient land plants that first populated the Earth's surface. student at University College Cork (UCC) Holly-Anne Turner is the first author on the study and conducted the research while an undergraduate student and Research Assistant at the University of Edinburgh. We'll be in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter, and if you want to continue getting smarter with us, you can go to /scishow and subscribe.The research published in the journal Science overturns a long-held theory around a famous pattern in nature. If you would like to get in touch with us, leave suggestions or ideas. Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow. When you draw an arc from one corner of each square to the other, they join to form a spiral that resembles many of the spirals we observe in nature, from the unfolding leaves of a desert succulent, the arrangement of those pine cone lobes and sunflower seeds, and the shells of some snails, the math, you guys, it can be beautiful, too. This rectangle can be divided up into a series of squares whose lengths are also successive Fibonacci numbers, in this case, 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, 5x5 and 8x8. There's a whole other set of patterns in nature that are based on what's called the Golden Rectangle, a rectangle whose side lengths are successive Fibonacci numbers like 8x13. And also, the length of a face divided by its width. ![]() He is said to have used Phi as a ratio between a statue's total height and the distance from the bottom of its feet to its navel, for instance. Phi was purportedly used by the Ancient Greek sculptor Phidias to illustrate the idea of physical perfection. The Greeks discovered this long before Fibonacci, and they called it Phi, today, it's sometimes known as the Golden Ratio. So, when you divide almost any Fibonacci number by the one before it in the sequence, especially the larger ones, you get the same number, 1.618 dot dot dot, whoa, lots of numbers. Now, plants don't grow this way because they're receiving some kind of mysterious cosmic mandate, they're doing it because it's the most efficient way to pack as many seeds as possible into a small space, and if you want to see why that is, you can go watch Vi Hart's video, which is linked in the description and it's awesome.īut in addition to the numbers themselves, you also see the same ratio between Fibonacci numbers showing up. Rows of seeds in sunflowers and pine cones always add up to Fibonacci numbers. If you cut a banana into slices, you'll see that it has three distinct sections, an apple has five, no matter what kind of flower you're looking at, chances are, it has three, five, eight, 13, or 21 petals. ![]() But the easiest place to find these numbers in nature isn't in bunnies, it's in plants. If you put one boy bunny and one girl bunny together, that's two, and those two together will make a third, and those three, when they're done, you know, taking turns, will make five, et cetera. The sequence was first described by mathematicians in India about 1300 years ago, and it was introduced to the west in 1202 by Leonardo of Pisa, aka Fibonacci, who was also responsible for introducing Arabic numerals to Europe, which, yeah, if he hadn't done that, we'd still be counting in Roman numerals, which would be terrible.įibonacci was a mathematician, and in his book, Liber Abaci, he described this sequence with a thought-experiment about a family of incestuous bunnies. You may know this pattern, the first and the second add up to the third, and the second and the third add up to the fourth, and the fourth and the fifth add up to the sixth and so on. Together, they're called the Fibonacci sequence and it goes something like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55. In fact, there are specific numbers that we see in nature all the time. Hank Green: Math wasn't made up to harass English majors, it was invented by a little something called nature, and it's everywhere you look. ![]()
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