Fibonacci Numbers

[blike]

Not sure what forum this goes under, so someone will have to move it to the right area.

 

Could someone explain to me fibonacci numbers? I tried google, but all I came up with was a bunch of sites that show how cauliflower has rows that spiral outwars, and so do pine cones My calculus teacher mentioned something about the ratio between your forehead and your bellybutton, and belly button to your toes is always the same for every person. Fibonacci was in the same sentence, but I didn't catch what he was trying to say about them (distracted w/ the fine specimen of female beside me). From what I can gather they are numbers that commonly occur throughout nature??

[Dave]

You probably searched for the wrong thing The best thing to search for is "fibonacci sequence" which gave this link at the top:

 

http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fib.html

 

It has quite a lot of information so you're going to be able to find something on them.

 

The entire thing revolves around the series of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence. It's a pretty simple little sequence, and a junior school kid could do it. It goes:

 

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.. and it's pretty simple to see that u(n) = u(n-1) + u(n-2) (i.e. the nth term in the sequence is determined by adding the preceeding two terms).

 

This is a pretty simple series but it does have some astounding connections with nature in general. The majority of them (to my knowledge) come from a number called the golden ratio (phi). This can be obtained from the Fibonacci series pretty easily, but I'll leave you to look that up.

 

This is a brief overview of this series, but that site looks to be pretty good at explaining quite a lot of stuff. I'm not an expert in it myself, but I can tell you that you can find some very interesting things out with the golden ratio itself, and it is a fascinating area to study.

 

(Incidentally, I think it may be more number theory oriented myself, but I'm not quite sure either )

[M-CaTZ]

blike, fibonacci sequence are 5th grade stuff man. Just rely on your hotornot replies for women and pay attention