Merz was part of the arte povera movement that sought to bring the natural world back to the gallery. You can see why the Italian artist Mario Merz wanted to write the sequence on a power station in Finland. A new educational centre at the Eden Project by Nicholas Grimshaw Architects exploits the Fibonacci numbers, and accountants reliably inform me that the profits from Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code follow the same escalating pattern. So renowned is the number series as a source of aesthetic harmony that there's even a chamber ensemble called the Fibonacci Sequence, which performs at the Tunbridge Wells festival next week. The cult of the Fibonacci sequence is itself proliferating according to an irresistible logic. If you begin with 0, then add 1, you get the next number, 0+1=1 the next after that is 1+1=2 then 1+2=3 and from there you get a rapid increase - the sequence runs 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on, quickly reaching huge figures. Mathematicians, however, can see that Leonardo's rabbits produce a very special sequence of numbers in which each equals the sum of the two preceding in the series. How many pairs of rabbits are there in December?Ī lot, would be my answer. For every month after, both rabbits breed a pair of rabbits, and each new pair also produce a pair a month. Suppose that a single pair of rabbits in January breed a second pair by February. It originates in a problem that the medieval mathematician Leonardo of Pisa - nicknamed Fibonacci - posed in 1202 in his Liber Abaci (Book of the Abacus). In 1964, an article in a journal called the Fibonacci Quarterly demonstrated that The Art of Fugue has a mathematical perfection - that in this composition, Bach exploits, in a final reach for the complex harmony that fascinated him all his life, a sequence of numbers that recurs again and again in the natural world and which has come to possess an almost mystical fascination not just for maths professors but for musicians, artists and architects.
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