| May's Tidbits and Challenges | ||||
| May Birthdays: Two famous mathematicians have birthdays this month: Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born on May 16th. She lived in Italy, from 1718 to 1799. In Italy, in the eighteenth century, most women could not read. It was felt that women went astray by reading bad books. With even a basic education so difficult to achieve, it makes her contributions to mathematics even more amazing. We'll learn more about her in coming months |
May is a month of flowers. Go outside, and stroll around a garden. Look closely at some flowers. Count the petals. What do you observe? Keep track of the numbers of petals on different flowers. You many notice that many of them are among the following number sequence: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89... This sequence of numbers is called the Fibonacci Sequence, named after the Italian mathematician. Can you tell how the sequence is formed? What are the next two numbers in the sequence? What do Fibonacci Numbers have to do with Flowers? For reasons we don't exactly know, Fibonacci numbers appear in nature far more often than other numbers. This month, find some flowers, and count the petals. Count the spirals in pine cones - in both directions. Do the same in pineapples, or sunflowers. See what you discover. And remember to stop and smell the roses.
Answer to top question: Fibonacci numbers are derived by adding the two previous numbers in the sequence. Hence the next two will be 144 and 233. |
Trigonometry students use the theorem that carries his name, a thoroughly elegant way to find roots and powers of complex numbers. He died in 1754. |
