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