If you’ve watched the movie Pi, you probably remember hearing about Fibonacci’s number, related to the golden ratio. It’s a sequence of numbers that when graphed, creates a pattern, often spiral structures, found in nature at a surprising frequency. Math is often thought to be a boring and repetitive process of reciting formulas and algorithms just to produce more numbers. While that does hold true to some extent, there are some pretty amazing things that mathematics, and especially their application to geometry, reveal. As creatures with a strong innate ability to seek patterns, revealing them in often simplistic geometry of mathematic patterns can be quite intriguing.

The nautilus shell above illustrates the golden ration as found within a natural construct. If you were to graph the parts of the shell in boxes, you’d find that each part nearly perfectly is a ratio of the other greater parts.

To further illustrate this effect, the following video “Nature by Numbers”  very beautifully shows just how stunning the geometry in nature is, despite our preconceptions that most of nature is random and difficult to measure.

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