FIBONACCI FAIL

My lone tulip that survived being eaten by squirrels - 3-6-6!

One of my favourite sequences that turned up in my daughter's elementary school math has a name, Fibonacci, as it approximates the golden ratio ( two quantities whose ratio is the same as the sum to the larger of the two), , and the more I learned about its application, the more I love it. It starts with 0, then 1, and then it adds the two previous numbers to get the next. It looks like this:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1587 2584 4181 6765 10946 17711 28657 46368

 I was thinking about this coming back from a fossil tour downtown, where we saw gastropod (snail) and sunflower coral fossils. I wanted to find more patterns. I immediately turned to my solitary precious blooming tulip (squirrels love to take a bite, knocking them to the ground on biting off their head), and was disappointed to find no such sequence! Here are a few inspiration patterns from a worthwhile kid-friendly Mother's Day talk from the very special McGill Redpath Natural History Museum.

There are many examples to find, though, even if tulips seem to buck the rule. Spiral galaxies and hurricane winds viewed by satellite, pine cones, artichokes, and pineapples, tree branches and leaves on branches, sunflowers and uncurling ferns, nautilus and snail shells, and even red cabbage in cross section are all beautiful exams in nature. If you want a simple cypher, or are stopping to smell the flowers, or searching a building stone wall for samples, look for a Fibonacci sequence near you!

Sunflower coral in Tyndall limestone at Le Chateau Apartments

on Sherbrooke street

Maclurite snail shells in Trenton limestone edging the Mount Royal Club from 285 million years ago