1.31.2011

Let's write a Fibonacci poem!


Here is a new challenge, one that brings together Maths, poetry, food and learning about each other- we hope you find it appetizing!
But, first, a few words about Fibonacci and his numbers.
Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1250) was an Italian Mathematician , considered by some "the most talented western mathematician of the Middle Ages". He is best known for spreading the nowadays Arabic numeral system in Europe and and for the number sequence named after him.
The first two numbers in his sequence are 0 and 1, then each number is the sum of the previous two: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89...that is

There are many interesting things about these numbers, but maybe the most intriguing is they appear very often in nature: the petals of flowers, the arrangement of leaves on a stem or branches on a tree, the bees or rabbits population numbers, the fruitlets of a pineapple, the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of pine cones and more, as you can see in the video.


We have already seen that Math and poetry are sometimes connected and one way of doing that is writing poems that have a Mathematical form, such as Fibonacci poems: the first two lines have 1 word, then 2 words, 3, 5, 8 etc.
Let us try to write a Fibonacci poem for each team, a bilingual poem (in English and our mother tongue) about bread (and what it means to us). It will help us learn more about our cultures and- why not?- about numbers and words!

Photo source and more information on the Fibonacci sequence here.

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