Plastic lilies and Fibonacci sequence
Walking on the wild side
MIKE MORRIS, Special to The Banner
I have a vase in my living room filled with plastic calla lilies. Besides being very easy to take care for, my lilies have a unique connection to an Italian mathematician.
Let's start with the mathematician Leonardo Pisano (1170-1250), better known by his nickname Fibonacci. He was born in Italy but was educated in North Africa where his father held a diplomatic post in a Mediterranean port in northeastern Algeria.
Fibonacci was taught mathematics in that city, travelled widely with his father, and recognized the enormous advantages of the mathematical systems used in the countries they visited.
Fibonacci ended his travels around the year 1200 and returned to Pisa. There he wrote a number of important texts which played an important role in reviving ancient mathematical skills.
He also made significant contributions of his own. Fibonacci lived in the days before printing, so his books were handwritten and the only way to have a copy of one of his books was to have another handwritten copy made.
A problem in one book led to the introduction of the Fibonacci numbers and the Fibonacci sequence for which he is best remembered today:
A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded on all sides by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive?
The resulting sequence is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, ... (Fibonacci omitted the first term, zero, in in his solution). This sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, has proved extremely useful and appears in many different areas of mathematics and science.
So, my plastic calla lilies? Fibonacci's numerical sequences has been widely applied to the number of petals on flowers. For example, a trillium has three petals. The calla lily, including my plastic ones, has only one petal. If you insert a zero in this sequence, you can use Fibonacci's numbers to model the number of petals on flowers up to 34 or 55 petals in some of the composite flowers, such as the daisies, sunflowers, and black-eyed susans.
When I bought my plastic calla lilies, did I know anything about Fibonacci's numbers? The only things that I knew was that I'd seen the lilies in some photographs, they looked like interesting flowers. I also correctly surmised that they'd require very little care.
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