Fibonacci Series Part - I
7 Minutes
Fibonacci series in nature explained for students, showing how number patterns appear in honeybees, flower petals, and fruits. A Tamil maths lesson.
- How honeybee family trees form the sequence by adding numbers
- Counting petals on different flowers to find Fibonacci numbers
- Apple sections, pineapple spirals, and sunflower seed patterns
What this lesson teaches
The Fibonacci series is a sequence of numbers where each number is found by adding together the two numbers that come directly before it, producing the pattern 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. This mathematical pattern appears naturally across many living things in nature.
How the sequence is formed
The sequence begins with the digits one and one. Adding these two digits gives two, and adding the last two numbers of one and two gives three. Continuing this process creates two plus three as five, three plus five as eight, five plus eight as thirteen, and eight plus thirteen as twenty-one.
The honeybee family tree
- A male honeybee needs only a female bee to be born, whereas a female honeybee requires both a male and a female parent.
- Tracing a single male bee backward shows one female parent in the first step and two parents in the second step.
- Moving further back through the family tree produces layers of three bees, then five bees, and then eight bees.
- The count of bees in each ancestor layer follows the numbers one, one, two, three, five, and eight.
Patterns in flowers and fruits
- Petals on many flowers match Fibonacci numbers, showing counts such as three, five, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, or fifty-five petals.
- Cutting open an apple shows five separate sections inside.
- Pineapple eyes sit in spirals, where counting along a spiral shows thirteen eyes and the entire fruit contains thirteen spirals.
- Sunflower seeds are arranged in clockwise and anticlockwise spirals, which packs a large number of seeds effectively into a small space.
History of the sequence
An Indian mathematician named Pingala first discovered this number sequence in the second century. About one thousand years later, Leonardo Fibonacci discovered the sequence and introduced it to Western countries, which led to it being named after him. While not every object in nature follows this rule, the pattern appears in many naturally formed plants, fruits, and creatures.