They can’t be attributed exclusively to the operation of a Fibonacci or Fibonacci-related sequence, Cooke contends. That’s very misleading because these three numbers belong to many different sequences. “It makes one almost forget that the Fibonacci sequence was first devised as the solution to a hypothetical mathematical problem about rabbit population growth.”įor example, the mere occurrence of the numbers 2, 3, and 5 (and possibly multiples of these numbers) in some process is cited remarkably often to disclose the underlying participation of the Fibonacci sequence, Cooke notes. “The Fibonacci literature has unbridled enthusiasm for identifying the putative involvement of the Fibonacci sequence in biological, and especially botanical, phenomena,” Cooke writes. Cooke of the University of Maryland discusses what he calls the “under-appreciated limitations of the Fibonacci sequence for describing phyllotactic patterns.” In a thought-provoking article in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, biologist Todd J. And it’s easy to find flowers with four (poppy, spring cress, cutleaf toothwort, forsythia, mint), six (snowdrop, tulip, gladiolus, iris, lily), seven (starflower), or nine (magnolia grandiflora) petals. The number of petals per flower may vary from plant to plant and flower to flower in the same species. It’s also easy to make too much of this coincidence. These numbers crop up surprisingly often in plants, from the clustering of petals on a flower to the arrangement of leaves on a stem. The numbers 3, 5, 8, 13, and 21 are all Fibonacci numbers-members of a sequence in which successive numbers are sums of the preceding two numbers, starting with 1 and 1: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and so on.
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