If you look closely at the head of a sunflower, you will see that the structures destined to become seeds grow in an intricate pattern of interwoven spirals. Such patterns, which seem to occur only in plants, have fascinated people and inspired a number of mathematical studies. Now two French scientists have set up a physical model that behaves in exactly the same way, producing the distinctive spiral patterns.
The head of a sunflower or a similar member of the daisy family (Compositae) exhibits two sets of spirals, one running clockwise and the other anticlockwise. Intriguingly, the number of spirals in one set is related to the number in the other in a special way: the two numbers are always adjacent members of the so-called Fibonacci series.
Leonardo Fibonacci, a 13th-century mathematician, discovered a mathematical series in which each number is obtained simply by adding together the previous two numbers. ...
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