LESSON 1: PATTERNS AND NUMBERS IN NATURE Let’s have a closer look at some of the real world fractal examples

some of the real world fractal examples around

us.
Objectives: At the end of the lesson, the students should be able to:
1. Fern — As you look deeper and deeper, you see a never ending
1. identify patterns in nature and regularities in the world; repetitive pattern.
2. articulate the importance of mathematics in one’s life;
3. argue about the nature of mathematics, what it is, how it is expressed,
represented, and used;
4. express appreciation for mathematics as a human endeavor.

LESSON PROPER

PATTERNS IN NATURE 2. Koch Snowflake — A beautiful example of a fractal with infinite

perimeter but finite area. The idea is, make an equilateral triangle.
Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form found in the
Now make another equilateral triangle above the previous one, but
natural world. These patterns recur in different contexts and can sometimes
in opposite direction. You’ll see small equilateral triangles on the
be modelled mathematically. Natural patterns include symmetries, trees,
boundary. Keep doing the same for them, and keep doing, keep
spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tessellations, cracks and stripes.
doing…
Chaos theory and chaotic models have applications in many areas When you keep doing it, soon after some depth, you’ll start seeing
including geology, economics, biology, meteorology etc, and can help the resemblance of pattern with a snowflake.
demystify the huge dynamic complex systems.

What is a fractal? — A fractal is a never ending pattern. They are

the images of dynamic systems — the pictures of ‘Chaos’. Geometrically,
they exist in between our familiar dimensions, nature is full of fractals, for
instance: trees, mountains, seashells, clouds, ferns, even human body.
These things look very complex and non-mathematical. Now, think what it
took to produce what you see. You’ll realise it takes endless repetition and
that gives rise to one of the defining characteristics of a fractal, a self
similarity. Fractals have vast applications in astronomy, fluid mechanics,
image compression etc as they hold the key to describe the real world better 3. Fractal Antenna — Above example of ‘koch snowflake’ shows a
than traditional science. fractal of perimeter increasing infinitely while it’s area can be
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 bounded. Using such property, fractal antenna was invented, using a
self-similar design to maximize the length of material that can
receive much weaker signals and transmit signals over long distance
without compromising the area and volume taken by the antenna
due to its fractal nature. This is very compact and have useful
applications in cellular telephone and microwave communications.

Squared Fibonacci Sequence: 0, 1, 1, 4, 9, 25, 64, …

Continuous sums:
0=0x1
0+1=1x1
0+1+1=1x2
0+1+1+4=2x3
0+1+1+4+9=3x5
4. ‘Fibonacci Sequence’. The Fibonacci sequence is a recursive 0 + 1 + 1 + 4 + 9 + 25 = 5 x 8 … and so on. (You see every time product of
sequence, generated by adding the two previous numbers, the first the sum is two consecutive fibonacci numbers)
two numbers of the sequence being 0 and 1.
So, Fibonacci sequence is 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 …
An interesting fact is that the number of petals on a flower always There’s a mathematical explanation for the pattern we see above.
turns out to be a fibonacci number. Statistically, this sequence Suppose you have squares of sides representing fibonacci numbers, and
appears a lot in botany. Another example is if you look at the bottom assemble them in the way shown below. The above pattern is nothing but
of pine cone, and count clockwise and anti-clockwise number of area of the rectangle formed by joining the squares (continued fibonacci
spirals, they turn out to be adjacent fibonacci numbers (see image squares sum).
below).

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 Plants often have radial or rotational symmetry, as do many
flowers and some groups of animals such as sea anemones.
Fibonacci spiral recurs throughout the nature — in the seed heads of
sunflower, the petals of a rose, the eye of the hurricane, the curve of a wave, Rotational symmetry is also found at different scales among non-
even the spiral of galaxies! living things including the crown-shaped splash pattern formed when a
drop falls into a pond, and both the spheroidal shape and rings of a planet
It seems that when we keep comparing ratios of two consecutive like Saturn.
fibonacci numbers, as we move further in the sequence, the ratio approaches
a value of 1.618034… which is called Φ or better, the golden ratio. This Radial symmetry suits organisms like sea anemones whose adults do
ratio has a beauty of special kind and is important to us. Why? — The not move: food and threats may arrive from any direction.
golden ratio appears everywhere — DNA, human body, eye of hurricane etc
— it appears in various structures of nature. This occurrence of Φ in
various aspects of nature, gives rise to the question that ‘Was our universe
intelligently designed, or is it just a cosmic coincidence?’ Rotational symmetry

5. Symmetry. Symmetry is pervasive in living things. Animals mainly

have bilateral or mirror symmetry, as do the leaves of plants and some
flowers such as orchids. Animals that move in one direction necessarily
have upper and lower sides, head and tail ends, and therefore a left and a
right. The head becomes specialized with a mouth and sense organs
(cephalization), and the body becomes bilaterally symmetric (though
internal organs need not be).

Mirror symmetry
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Threefold Symmetry

Among non-living things, snowflakes have striking six-fold

symmetry: each flake’s structure forming a record of the varying
conditions during its crystallization, with nearly the same pattern of growth
Fourfold Symmetry on each of its six arms.

Sixfold Symmetry

Fivefold symmetry is found in the echinoderms, the group that

includes starfish, sea urchins, and sea lilies. The reason for the fivefold
(penta-radiate) symmetry of the echinoderms is puzzling. Early
echinoderms were bilaterally symmetrical, as their larvae still are. Crystals in general have a variety of symmetries and crystal habits;
they can be cubic or octahedral, but true crystals cannot have fivefold
symmetry (unlike quasicrystals).

6. Trees, fractals. Fractals are infinitely self-similar, iterated

mathematical constructs having fractal dimension. Infinite iteration is
Fivefold Symmetry not possible in nature so all ‘fractal’ patterns are only approximate.

For example, the leaves of ferns and umbellifers (Apiaceae) are only
self-similar (pinnate) to 2, 3 or 4 levels.
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 Fern-like growth patterns occur in plants and in animals including cones, where multiple spirals run both clockwise and anticlockwise.
bryozoa, corals, hydrozoa like the air fern, Sertularia argentea, and in These arrangements have explanations at different levels – mathematics,
non-living things, notably electrical discharges. physics, chemistry, biology – each individually correct, but all
necessary together.
Lindenmayer system fractals can model different patterns of tree growth
by varying a small number of parameters including branching angle, Phyllotaxis spirals can be generated mathematically from Fibonacci
distance between nodes or branch points (internode length), and number ratios: the Fibonacci sequence runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… (each
of branches per branch point. subsequent number being the sum of the two preceding ones). For
example, when leaves alternate up a stem, one rotation of the spiral
Fractal-like patterns occur widely in nature, in phenomena as diverse as touches two leaves, so the pattern or ratio is 1/2. In hazel the ratio is 1/3;
clouds, river networks, geologic fault lines, mountains, coastlines, in apricot it is 2/5; in pear it is 3/8; in almond it is 5/13.
animal coloration, snow flakes, crystals, blood vessel branching, and
ocean waves. Phyllotaxis is controlled by proteins that manipulate the concentration
of the plant hormone auxin, which activates meristem growth, alongside
Leaf of Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, is 2- or 3-pinnate, not other mechanisms to control the relative angle of buds around the stem.
infinite
In disc phyllotaxis as in the sunflower and daisy, the florets are arranged
in Fermat’s spiral with Fibonacci numbering, at least when the
flowerhead is mature so all the elements are the same size.

7. From the point of view of physics, spirals are lowest-energy

configurations which emerge spontaneously through self-organizing
processes in dynamic systems. From the point of view of chemistry, a
Spirals. Spirals are common in plants and in some animals, notably spiral can be generated by a reaction-diffusion process, involving both
molluscs. activation and inhibition.

For example, in the nautilus, a cephalopod mollusc, each chamber of its From a biological perspective, arranging leaves as far apart as possible
shell is an approximate copy of the next one, scaled by a constant factor in any given space is favoured by natural selection as it maximises
and arranged in a logarithmic spiral. Given a modern understanding of access to resources, especially sunlight for photosynthesis.
fractals, a growth spiral can be seen as a special case of self-similarity.

Plant spirals can be seen in phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves on a

stem, and in the arrangement (parastichy) of other parts as in composite
flower heads and seed heads like the sunflower or fruit structures like
the pineapple and snake fruit, as well as in the pattern of scales in pine

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 9. Waves, dunes. Waves are disturbances that carry energy as they move.
Mechanical waves propagate through a medium – air or water, making
it oscillate as they pass by.

Wind waves are sea surface waves that create the characteristic chaotic
pattern of any large body of water, though their statistical behaviour can
8. Chaos, flow, meanders. In mathematics, a dynamical system is chaotic be predicted with wind wave models.
if it is (highly) sensitive to initial conditions (the so-called “butterfly
effect”), which requires the mathematical properties of topological As waves in water or wind pass over sand, they create patterns of
mixing and dense periodic orbits. ripples. When winds blow over large bodies of sand, they create dunes,
sometimes in extensive dune fields as in the Taklamakan desert.
Vortex streets are zigzagging patterns of whirling vortices created by
the unsteady separation of flow of a fluid, most often air or water, over Dunes may form a range of patterns including crescents, very long
obstructing objects. Smooth (laminar) flow starts to break up when the straight lines, stars, domes, parabolas, and longitudinal or Seif (‘sword’)
size of the obstruction or the velocity of the flow become large enough shapes.
compared to the viscosity of the fluid.
Barchans or crescent dunes are produced by wind acting on desert sand;
Meanders are sinuous bends in rivers or other channels, which form as a the two horns of the crescent and the slip face point downwind.
fluid, most often water, flows around bends. As soon as the path is
slightly curved, the size and curvature of each loop increases as helical Sand blows over the upwind face, which stands at about 15 degrees
flow drags material like sand and gravel across the river to the inside of from the horizontal, and falls on to the slip face, where it accumulates
the bend. The outside of the loop is left clean and unprotected, so up to the angle of repose of the sand, which is about 35 degrees.
erosion accelerates, further increasing the meandering in a powerful
positive feedback loop. When the slip face exceeds the angle of repose, the sand avalanches,
which is a nonlinear behaviour: the addition of many small amounts of
sand causes nothing much to happen, but then the addition of a further
small amount suddenly causes a large amount to avalanche.

Apart from this nonlinearity, barchans behave rather like solitary waves.

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 The Euler characteristic states that for any convex polyhedron, the
number of faces plus the number of vertices (corners) equals the
number of edges plus two. A result of this formula is that any closed
polyhedron of hexagons has to include exactly 12 pentagons, like a
soccer ball, Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, or fullerene molecule.

This can be visualised by noting that a mesh of hexagons is flat like a

sheet of chicken wire, but each pentagon that is added forces the mesh
to bend (there are fewer corners, so the mesh is pulled in).

10. Bubbles, foam. A soap bubble forms a sphere, a surface with

minimal area — the smallest possible surface area for the volume
enclosed. Two bubbles together form a more complex shape: the
outer surfaces of both bubbles are spherical; these surfaces are
joined by a third spherical surface as the smaller bubble bulges
slightly into the larger one.

A foam is a mass of bubbles; foams of different materials occur in 11. Tessellations. Tessellations are patterns formed by repeating tiles all
nature. Foams composed of soap films obey Plateau’s laws, which over a flat surface. There are 17 wallpaper groups of tilings. While
require three soap films to meet at each edge at 120° and four soap common in art and design, exactly repeating tilings are less easy to find
edges to meet at each vertex at the tetrahedral angle of about 109.5°.
in living things.
Plateau’s laws further require films to be smooth and continuous, and
to have a constant average curvature at every point. For example, a The cells in the paper nests of social wasps, and the wax cells in
film may remain nearly flat on average by being curved up in one honeycomb built by honey bees are well-known examples.
direction (say, left to right) while being curved downwards in another
direction (say, front to back). Among animals, bony fish, reptiles or the pangolin, or fruits like the
Salak are protected by overlapping scales or osteoderms, these form
At the scale of living cells, foam patterns are common; radiolarians, more-or-less exactly repeating units, though often the scales in fact vary
sponge spicules, silicoflagellate exoskeletons and the calcite skeleton continuously in size.
of a sea urchin, Cidaris rugosa, all resemble mineral casts of Plateau
foam boundaries. The skeleton of the Radiolarian, Aulonia hexagona, a Among flowers, the Snake’s Head Fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris, have a
beautiful marine form drawn by Haeckel, looks as if it is a sphere tessellated chequerboard pattern on their petals.
composed wholly of hexagons, but this is mathematically impossible.

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 The structures of minerals provide good examples of regularly repeating Since each species of tree has its own structure at the levels of cell and of
three-dimensional arrays. molecules, each has its own pattern of splitting in its bark.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of known minerals, there are rather

few possible types of arrangement of atoms in a crystal, defined by
crystal structure, crystal system, and point group; for example, there are
exactly 14 Bravais lattices for the 7 lattice systems in three-dimensional
space.

13. Spots, stripes. Leopards and ladybirds are spotted; angelfish and zebras
are striped.

These patterns have an evolutionary explanation: they have functions which

increase the chances that the offspring of the patterned animal will survive
to reproduce.

One function of animal patterns is camouflage; for instance, a leopard that

12. Cracks. Cracks are linear openings that form in materials to relieve is harder to see catches more prey.
stress.
Another function is signalling — for instance, a ladybird is less likely to be
When an elastic material stretches or shrinks uniformly, it eventually attacked by predatory birds that hunt by sight, if it has bold warning
reaches its breaking strength and then fails suddenly in all directions, colours, and is also distastefully bitter or poisonous, or mimics other
creating cracks with 120 degree joints, so three cracks meet at a node. distasteful insects.

Conversely, when an inelastic material fails, straight cracks form to relieve A young bird may see a warning patterned insect like a ladybird and try to
the stress. Further stress in the same direction would then simply open the eat it, but it will only do this once; very soon it will spit out the bitter insect;
existing cracks; stress at right angles can create new cracks, at 90 degrees to the other ladybirds in the area will remain unmolested.
the old ones.

Thus the pattern of cracks indicates whether the material is elastic or not. In
a tough fibrous material like oak tree bark, cracks form to relieve stress as
usual, but they do not grow long as their growth is interrupted by bundles of
strong elastic fibres.