The life and numbers of Fibonacci

 Fibonacciis one of the most famous names in

mathematics. This would come as a surprise to
Leonardo Pisano, the mathematician we now know
by that name. And he might have been equally
surprised that he has been immortalised in the
famous sequence – 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... –
rather than for what is considered his far greater
mathematical achievement – helping to popularise
our modern number system in the Latin-speaking
world.
 Leonardo Pisano was born late in the twelfth
century in Pisa, Italy: Pisano in Italian indicated
that he was from Pisa, in the same way
Mancunian indicates that I am from
Manchester. His father was a merchant called
Guglielmo Bonaccio and it's because of his
father's name that Leonardo Pisano became
known as Fibonacci. Centuries later, when
scholars were studying the hand written copies
of Liber Abaci (as it was published before
printing was invented), they misinterpreted
part of the title – "filius Bonacci" meaning "son
of Bonaccio" – as his surname, and Fibonacci
was born.
The problem with rabbits
 One of the mathematical problems Fibonacci
investigated in Liber Abaci was about how fast
rabbits could breed in ideal circumstances.
Suppose a newly-born pair of rabbits, one male,
one female, are put in a field. Rabbits are able to
mate at the age of one month so that at the end of
its second month a female can produce another
pair of rabbits. Suppose that our rabbits never die
and that the female always produces one new pair
(one male, one female) every month from the
second month on. The puzzle that Fibonacci posed
was... How many pairs will there be in one year?
 Atthe end of the first month, they mate, but
there is still only 1 pair.
 Atthe end of the second month the female
produces a new pair, so now there are 2 pairs of
rabbits.
 Atthe end of the third month, the original
female produces a second pair, making 3 pairs in
all.
 Atthe end of the fourth month, the original
female has produced yet another new pair, the
female born two months ago produced her first
pair also, making 5 pairs.
  
Now that there are xpairs of rabbit after month.
The number of pairs in a month +1 will be x
(considering no rabbits will die) plus the number of
new pairs born. But new pairs are only born to pairs
after one month old, so there will be x-1 new pairs.
So we have x+1= x+ x-1 which is simply the rule for
generating the Fibonacci numbers: add the last two
to get the next. Following this through you'll find
that after 12 months (or 1 year), there will be 233
pairs of rabbits.
Spirals and shells
 This set of rectangles whose sides are two
successive Fibonacci numbers in length and
which are composed of squares with sides
which are Fibonacci numbers, we will call
the Fibonacci Rectangles.

The image of a cross-section of

a nautilus shell shows the spiral
curve of the shell and the
internal chambers that the
animal using it adds on as it
grows. The chambers provide
buoyancy in the water.
Fibonacci numbers also appear in plants and
flowers. 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 or even as many as
89 petals!
Golden Growth
 Botanists have shown that plants grow from a
single tiny group of cells right at the tip of any
growing plant, called the meristem. There is a
separate meristem at the end of each branch
or twig where new cells are formed. Once
formed, they grow in size, but new cells are
only formed at such growing points. Cells
earlier down the stem expand and so the
growing point rises. Also, these cells grow in a
spiral fashion: it's as if the meristem turns by
an angle, produces a new cell, turns again by
the same angle, produces a new cell, and so
on. These cells may then become a seed, a new
leaf, a new branch, or perhaps on a flower
become petals and stamens.
The golden ratio
 If we take the ratio of two successive numbers in Fibonacci's series, dividing
each by the number before it, we will find the following series of numbers:
 1/1 = 1, 2/1 = 2, 3/2 = 1.5, 5/3 = 1.666..., 8/5 = 1.6, 13/8 = 1.625, 21/13 =
1.61538...
 If you plot a graph of these values you'll see that they seem to be tending to a
limit, which we call the golden ratio(also known as the golden
number and golden section).
 It has a value of (√5 + 1)/2 ( approximately 1.618034) and is often
represented by a Greek letter Phi, written as ɸ. The closely
related value which we write as a lowercase phi, is just the
decimal part of Phi, namely 0.618034... (√5 - 1)/2, the number
that accounts for the spirals in the seed heads and the
arrangements of leaves in many plants. But why do we see phi in
so many plants?
 The number Phi (1.618034...), and therefore also phi
(0.618034...), are irrational numbers: they can't be written as a
simple fraction. Let's see what would happen if the meristem in a
seed head instead turned by some simpler number, for example
the fraction 1/2. After two turns through half of a circle we
would be back to where the first seed was produced. Over time,
turning by half a turn between seeds would produce a seed head
with two arms radiating from a central point, leaving lots of
wasted space.