Trying variants of a simple mathematical rule that yields interesting results can lead to additional discoveries and curiosities. The numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and 55 belong to a famous ...

As their results began to crystallize, at first they didn’t notice the striking patterns emerging. But a colleague who reviewed their work spotted the famed Fibonacci numbers—a list whose entries have ...

A variation of a puzzle called the “pick-up sticks problem” asks the following question: If I have some number of sticks with random lengths between 0 and 1, what are the chances that no three of ...

Pine cones. Stock-market quotations. Sunflowers. Classical architecture. Reproduction of bees. Roman poetry. What do they have in common? In one way or another, these and many more creations of nature ...

A series of whole numbers in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. Fibonacci numbers are used in a variety of algorithms, including stock market analysis.

Back in 1855, German psychologist Adolf Zeising published a book with a ridiculously long title called: A New Theory of the proportions of the human body, developed from a basic morphological law ...