4/13/2024 0 Comments Fibonacci sequence in nature mythHave a favorite mathematical myth (whether true or false)? Share it in the comments. Now I just have to find the time to write the article… It looks like I have one more item to add to my list of myths. God Plays Dice points out that this was known already. Today God Plays Dice wrote about a year-and-a-half old blog posting by Shallow Thoughts in which Shallow Thoughts discovered that the nautilus shell does not have the shape of the “golden” logarithmic spiral (he has a nice photo to illustrate this). As Underwood Dudley wrote in his scathing review of The (Fabulous) Fibonacci Numbers, “I would say that had done it once and for all, but the truth is sometimes slow to catch up with gee-whiz stories.” (My hunch is that the staying-power of these myths is due to their presence in the 1959 cartoon Donald in Mathemagic Land, which, if my childhood was typical, most schoolchildren watch every year for several years in their math classes.) Most of these were soundly debunked by George Markowsky in his article “ Misconceptions of the Golden Ratio” (in the January 1992 issue of the College Mathematics Journal). Here's one that debunks some of the claims in music specifically. this article by mathematician Samuel Arbesman, and this one by Prof Donald Simanek. ![]() When I do I will certainly include the many glorious myths about the golden ratio and the Fibonacci numbers in art, architecture, and nature. The idea that the Golden Ratio and Fibonacci sequence occurs everywhere in nature and human esthetics is regarded by many as a pure myth: See e.g. ![]() ![]() Well, summer slipped away and the article didn’t get written (although I’m still planning to do so). Some examples are the myths that there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics because a mathematician had an affair with Nobel’s wife (not true), the Bible says (essentially true), and that the young Gauss amazed his teacher by summing 1 to 100 (sort of true). It had the working title “Mythematics.” The idea would be to state several famous mathematical myths and either debunk them or argue for their veracity (inspired by the Mythbusters TV show). I jotted down notes all summer in preparation for an entertaining article that I hoped to write for an undergraduate journal like Mathematics Magazine, College Mathematics Journal, The Mathematical Intelligencer, etc.
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