Please excuse my ignorance. How did y’all learn about fibonacci numbers? I only recall arithmetic and geometric progressions. What course included the concept?
On the internet.
I read books by Graham Hancock.
There are these numbers, you see, and they seem to relate to everything, so we ignore them at our peril.
This kind of stuff make me question things, and.... Life is Weird, so that was my starting point.
It was in the first Star Wars movie: "The Fibonacci Series surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together." Or maybe I'm mis-remembering that a little.
The Fibonacci numbers are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... (add the last two to get the next)
From this seemingly simple beginning, a profundity of complexity ensues.
These numbers and their relationships occur in Nature, and perhaps came under study for that reason. But anyone can follow these revelations, even when they lead to marvelous insights.
Wiki gives it a very pretty presentation.
Vi Hart is pretty good.
If you can keep up with her frenetic pace, that is.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart
i believe you can go through college without having heard of fibonacci numbers except perhaps in passing.
i read about them first in a student science magazine my parents subscribed to for me. then my high school math teacher did a segment on them - but he was a state award-winning teacher who went waaaaay off-book with special projects to 'enrich the learning experience.'
i had to do a project, with backboard, on fibonacci numbers as a sophomore in high school and have read anything i've seen about them since.
i love the way fibonnaci numbers occur in nature. the number of petals on almost every flower species in a fibonnaci number. daisies, for example, have 13, 21, 34, 55 or 89 petals except in the case of mutation; each of those is a fibonacci number.
from the top, the tiny florets in the core of a daisy blossom - there are twenty-one counterclockwise and thirty-four equiangular spirals. both fibonnaci. and they are successive fibonnaci numbers.
same for the spirals on a pinecone or a pineapple - fibonnaci in number, and successive fibonnaci numbers to boot. except that, because pineabpples have hexagonal 'scales', there are three distinct types of spirals, all fibonacci in number, and three successive fibonnaci numbers.
it's eerie, and i'm not talking about upper midwestern lakes.