10. Fibonacci's annoying sequence

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

For the record, I was never any good at maths at school. I didn't need to be, because the only thing I risked was my grades, and I didn't think any of it counted. My teachers would write: 'Must try harder' on my annual report. What they should have written was 'he doesn't try at all.' I didn't think I would ever be in a situation where I would need maths, so I let a lot of it pass me by. I was wrong.

I hadn't realised that I would be living a life where maths would be needed - nay essential - for shopping, paying bills, checking my bank balance and being employed - to name just a few. Still, once I got away from the basic arithmetic needed to run my life and my home, it always got just a bit esoteric. Algebra and simultaneous equations were never a strong point for me, so if someone started talking to me about Fermat's last theorum, or the Mandelbrot set, or the Fibonacci numbers, it would leave me cold. It didn't compute.

Then someone told me (or I may have read it) that Fibonacci's sequence is actually reflected in nature and represents the building blocks of snail shells, pine cones, flowers and the spirals of the galaxy, I began to get interested. I began to understand the golden ratio. I saw the mathematical light. I figured it out (oh good grief, enough of the puns already - Editor).

It's funny, isn't it, that when subjects like maths were taught in my school years, they seemed so boring. This was because I was never able to connect them to anything I was really interested in. But this is different. Suddenly, sequences of numbers have a meaning in my world....

But the Fibonacci sequence is still annoying. It's annoying because it's a sequence and it's easy to follow and understand. Firstly, it starts with a 1, and then follows with another 1. Then it gets a little easier to follow, because what you do next is add the two numbers together to get the next number. So 1+1 = 2. Then 1+2 = 3, and 2+3 = 5, and 3+5 = 8 .... and the same formula is repeated again and again ad infinitum (probably the only Latin you know - Editor) and a pattern emerges. So ipso facto, the sequence continues and forms an increasingly growing spiral when it's mapped mathematically. This is per se quite remarkable because much of nature ut supra, seems to follow this sequence (OK, enough - stop showing off - Editor).

The entire universe seems to be based on mathematics. And that's what's so annoying about the Fibonacci sequence. It reminds me that I was so wrong at school for disregarding maths as irrelevant, when in fact it is present in just about every aspect of my life and in the world around me. I'm also annoyed that my teachers never bothered to tell me any of this, because if they had, I would have been hooked for life, right there and then. And that about sums it up.

Next time: 11. Sod's unlucky law

Previous posts in this series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora's closed box
6. Frankenstein's well-meaning monster
7. Thor's lost hammer
8. Noah's character ark
9. Hobson's multiple choice


Fibonacci's annoying sequence by Steve Wheeler was written in Paris, France and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's