Maths is all around us

galileo galilei

the man who persuaded the world the

earth rotated around the sun

and invented amazing telescopes that

helped us look into space

500 years ago once said the book of

nature

is written in the language of

mathematics

i love and have always loved maths i

also love nature and we spent

hours walking in the parks and

countryside i can see that maths is all

around us

and i have spent some time looking at

four famous mathematicians who have

shown us

the maths in nature i want to start with

a man

named leonardo fibonacci fibonacci lived

in italy around

1 000 years ago he was the son of a

merchant

he used to travel around with his father

and watch him buying and selling goods

this meant that he became very

interested in numbers

as he grew up he studied hard and wrote

a number of books about maths

but what he is most famous for is

something called the fibonacci sequence

the sequence came about when he posed

this question

if you put a pair of rabbits in a walled

garden a boy and a girl

how many pairs will be produced in one

year if every month

each pair produces another he came up

with something like this

one and one then two

one and one added together then three

one and two added together

and so forth he kept adding the numbers

next to each other together

and then put that result at the end of

the sequence

finally he had something like this 1 1

2 3 5 8 and 13 and so on

he put these numbers into a diagram and

it looks something like this

now this is called phi and you can see

it everywhere in nature

here you can see it as plants grow

here you can see it in the tail of a

seahorse and

even here these are pictures of real

galaxies taken in space

you can see the spiral in each of them

now when i go for a walk along a park or

a lot sorry

in a park or along any road i can see

that the mass around me has a

mathematical pattern to it

this makes it very interesting

as well as plants i like animals and one

day i realized that some animals had

quite similar patterns on their backs

so i decided to look into it i came

across a man named georgie voronoi

voronoi was ukrainian mathematician and

he lived around 100 years ago

sadly he only died when he was 40 but he

did

discover something very important the

voronoi pattern

you can picture this pattern like this

if you were to sprinkle some salt on a

table

and then draw lines that were

equidistant to each of the grains

you would get the voronoi pattern you

can see this pattern everywhere around

you in nature

here you can see it on the back of a

turtle

here you can even see it on the skin of

a giraffe and here you can see it

on the inside of the skin of an onion

next time you go for a walk have a look

around you maybe it’s a leaf or some

dried mud

and you will see a familiar pattern

talking of patterns on animals i came

across

another man named archimedes archimedes

was a greek mathematician and

philosopher

and he lived around 2 300 years ago

that’s 300 years before the birth of

jesus christ

and he was a very clever man and made

many very important discoveries in the

world of mathematics

one of the best things that he did was

to discover the number pi

pi is the number you get if you divide

the circumference of a circle

the way around it but i do by the

diameter the way through it

pi is very simple to work out and it’s a

very very amazing number

three things that are amazing about it

are that it goes on

forever and ever it never repeats itself

and it has been calculated to over one

trillion digits that’s a million

millions what is also incredible about

the number pi

is that scientists have discovered that

the placement and frequency of some

markings on animals backs

are to do with the number pi like here

on the dots on this starfish

or here on the spot on this whale

when i was looking into pi i discovered

that it was called an irrational number

which means you can never put it all

into one place it just keeps going on

and

on forever when i was looking into

irrational numbers

i discovered there was also something

called an imaginary number

a number that doesn’t exist and the man

often thought responsible of imaginary

numbers

was a man named leonard euler euler was

a swiss mathematician and he lived

around the 1700s so around 300 years ago

he looks something like this and he

wanted to be able to calculate things

to do with sound waves light waves and

waves in the water

at his time he didn’t have any way to do

this so he decided to come up with his

own way

but the thing this is the weird thing

about the thing he did

he came up with a number but a number

that didn’t exist

he came up with the number square root

of negative one

but we all know the square root of

negative one isn’t possible

because negative one times negative one

is one

but he used it anyway and he came up

with some very clever calculations like

this one

he now he called it i and this is an

example of a calculation that he did

now everybody uses i to work out things

like sound waves light waves waves in

the water

and even things to do with microwaves

i have come to see that maths is not

just a boring subject that we have to do

in school

it is everywhere we look and in

everything we see

and i especially love the saying of a

famous indian mathematician

named shakuntala devi who only died a

few years ago

but before she did she said without

mathematics there is nothing you can do

everything around you is mathematics

everything around you is numbers