Did You Celebrate Fibonacci Day?



This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from

the user Chris 73 and is freely available at

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NautilusCutawayLogarithmicSpiral.jpg

under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.



Why did I picture a Chambered Nautilus today?  Am I finally making an art quilt?  Oh no, not me … but the Golden Ratio [and in geometry, the Golden Spiral as in the Chambered Nautilus above] does make for a lovely quilt – see a wonderful link at the end of this post.

Yesterday was Fibonacci Day and I missed it.  It is called Fibonacci Day because the first four numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 1123 (although a zero precedes it).

Leonardo da Pisa (nicknamed Fibonacci), a mathematician, was born in Pisa around 1170 AD and is best known for a simple series of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence.  The series begins with 0 and 1. After that, it uses the simple rule of adding the last two numbers to get the next:            1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.

The Fibonacci sequence appears consistently nature – in various ways in seeds, flowers, petals, pine cones, fruit and vegetables, among others. Some plants branch in such a way that they always have a Fibonacci number of growing points. Flowers often have a Fibonacci number of petals, daisies can have 34, 55 even 89 petals.  Seeds of a sunflower appear to spiral outwards to the left and to the right - and there are a Fibonacci number of spirals.  This arrangement keeps the seeds uniformly packed no matter how large the seed head.  Isn’t nature wonderful?

Read more about Fibonacci at these sites:

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Fibonacci.html

http://plus.maths.org/issue3/fibonacci/

http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_17.htm

This is the basis for a quilt that I mentioned at the beginning of this post ... Successive points dividing a golden rectangle into squares lie on a logarithmic spiral which is sometimes known as the golden spiral.
Image Source: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GoldenRatio.html

You can see some gorgeous pictures of quilts designed and made using the Fibonacci Sequence at http://www.bryerpatch.com/gallery/fibonacci_quilts.htm

Happy Quilting!