Fibonacci's Flowers

In today's hectic world, rarely does one have time to stop and look at the flowers anymore. Regardless, an international consortium of mathematicians and botanists have finally cracked the code that lies at the heart of many a plant. As it turns out, the Fibonacci sequence has deeper roots than we all thought (pardon the pun):

Plants with spiral patterns related to the golden angle also display another curious mathematical property. The seeds of a flower head form interlocking spirals in both clockwise and counterclockwise directions. The number of clockwise spirals differs from the number of counterclockwise spirals, and these two numbers are called the plant's parastichy numbers (pronounced pi-RAS-tik-ee or PEHR-us-tik-ee).

These numbers have a remarkable consistency. They are almost always two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, which are another one of nature's mathematical favorites. The Fibonacci numbers form the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 . . . , in which each number is the sum of the previous two.

Read the whole story here on
ScienceNews.org