Fibonacci Mon Amour

Today’s post is mostly pictorial. I was messing about putting images on our Pinterest page and I came across a picture of a spiral staircase and it hit me like a thunderclap. I realised that at the back of my mind I’ve been looking at the trees and the falling leaves  and the flight patterns of birds for the last couple of weeks and it’s like I’ve had an itch at the back of my mind. I’m a bit obsessed with trees anyway (don’t ask. But, really – are fractals amazing or what?) so I tend to ignore any tree-related madness on my part. I finally figured out that I’ve been trying to find the patterns in the things I see and of course, that reminded me of the wonderful Leornado Bonacci, aka Fibonacci. I don’t know what was in the water in Tuscany during the  later Middle Ages to the Renaissance but that area certainly produced more than its fair share of geniuses.

The Fibonacci sequence of numbers and the Golden Ratio is everywhere in nature, and I mean everywhere – pine cones, cauliflower heads, broccoli, ocean waves, cloud patterns, petals on flowers, leaf arrangements on plants, pineapples, hurricanes, galaxies, not to mention the family trees of honeybees and rabbits (I’m not making it up!) and the famous Nautilus shell. Of course as a Christian I think it is more apt to call it by its other name – the Divine Proportion. I’m not going to bang on about how beautiful it is, that is self-evident. This wonderful balance is what every decent designer is trying to achieve. For me, this is the acme of perfection – to steal a phrase, it feels like touching the face of God Himself. Look and marvel.