Mathematics in the Modern World

Mathematics
in Our World

Mathematics in our World

 Mathematics in the Modern World

UNIT 1: Mathematics in our World

At the end of the lesson the students are expected to:
1. identify patterns in nature and regularities in the world
2. discuss the importance of mathematics in one’s life
3. differentiate the patterns in nature
4. express appreciation for mathematics as a human endeavor
Introduction
Mathematics relies on both logic and creativity, and it is pursued both for a variety of practical
purposes and for its intrinsic interest. For some people, and not only professional mathematicians, the
essence of mathematics lies in its beauty and its intellectual challenge. For others, including many
scientists and engineers, the chief value of mathematics is how it applies to their own work. Because
mathematics plays such a central role in modern culture, some basic understanding of the nature of
mathematics is requisite for scientific literacy. To achieve this, students need to perceive mathematics as
part of the scientific endeavor, comprehend the nature of mathematical thinking, and become familiar
with key mathematical ideas and skills.
Mathematics reveals hidden patterns that help us understand the world around us. Now much more
than arithmetic and geometry, mathematics today is a diverse discipline that deals with data,
measurements, and observations from science; with inference, deduction, and proof; and with
mathematical models of natural phenomena, of human behavior, and of social systems.
Mathematics helps predicts the behavior of nature and phenomena in the world. In addition to
theorems and theories, mathematics offers distinctive modes of thought which are both versatile and
powerful, including modeling, abstraction, optimization, logical analysis, inference from data, and use of
symbols. Experience with mathematical modes of thought builds mathematical power--a capacity of mind
of increasing value in this technological age that enables one to read critically, to identify fallacies, to
detect bias, to assess risk, and to suggest alternatives. Mathematics empowers us to understand better the
information-laden world in which we live.
Mathematics helps control nature and occurrence in the world. Mathematics can helps us control
nature and occurrences in the world for our own good through mathematical modeling. By mathematical
modeling we see the inputs to events and their most likely outcomes. Knowing these inputs and seeing
their consequences and establishing their relationship defined quantitatively, we can prepare for untoward
consequences, or better yet, maybe we can stop them from happening.
Mathematics has numerous applications in the world. Math is everywhere; in arts, finance, industry,
time, sports, travelling, shopping, and even in structural designs. When we are travelling, we calculate the
distance of our destination how long it will take us to get there. When we shop, we need money to buy,
we look at the price, we look on the sale. Sports like basketball used rectangular, circles, and angles.

Patterns in Nature

Definition of Pattern
• Repeated design or recurring sequence.
• An ordered set of numbers, shapes or other mathematical objects, arranged according to a rule.

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Examples:

Definition of Nature

• The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and
other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.

Mathematics is the science of patterns and relationships in nature. As a theoretical discipline,

mathematics explores the possible relationships among abstractions without concern for whether those
abstractions have counterparts in the real world. The abstractions can be anything from strings of numbers
to geometric figures to sets of equations. In addressing, say, "Does the interval between prime numbers
form a pattern?" as a theoretical question, mathematicians are interested only in finding a pattern or
proving that there is none, but not in what use such knowledge might have. In deriving, for instance, an
expression for the change in the surface area of any regular solid as its volume approaches zero,
mathematicians have no interest in any correspondence between geometric solids and physical objects in
the real world.
Mathematics is also an applied science. Many mathematicians focus their attention on solving
problems that originate in the world of experience. They too search for patterns and relationships, and in
the process they use techniques that are similar to those used in doing purely theoretical mathematics. The
difference is largely one of intent. In contrast to theoretical mathematicians, applied mathematicians, in
the examples given above, might study the interval pattern of prime numbers to develop a new system for
coding numerical information, rather than as an abstract problem. Or they might tackle the area/volume
problem as a step in producing a model for the study of crystal behavior.

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MATHEMATICS, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY

Because of its abstractness, mathematics is universal in a sense that other fields of human thought
are not. It finds useful applications in business, industry, music, historical scholarship, politics, sports,
medicine, agriculture, engineering, and the social and natural sciences. The relationship between
mathematics and the other fields of basic and applied science is especially strong. This is so for several
reasons, including the following:

• The alliance between science and mathematics has a long history, dating back many centuries.
Science provides mathematics with interesting problems to investigate, and mathematics provides
science with powerful tools to use in analyzing data. Often, abstract patterns that have been
studied for their own sake by mathematicians have turned out much later to be very useful in
science. Science and mathematics are both trying to discover general patterns and relationships,
and in this sense they are part of the same endeavor.
• Mathematics is the chief language of science. The symbolic language of mathematics has turned
out to be extremely valuable for expressing scientific ideas unambiguously. The statement that
a=F/m is not simply a shorthand way of saying that the acceleration of an object depends on the
force applied to it and its mass; rather, it is a precise statement of the quantitative relationship
among those variables. More important, mathematics provides the grammar of science—the rules
for analyzing scientific ideas and data rigorously.
• Mathematics and science have many features in common. These include a belief in
understandable order; an interplay of imagination and rigorous logic; ideals of honesty and
openness; the critical importance of peer criticism; the value placed on being the first to make a
key discovery; being international in scope; and even, with the development of powerful
electronic computers, being able to use technology to open up new fields of investigation.
• Mathematics and technology have also developed a fruitful relationship with each other. The
mathematics of connections and logical chains, for example, has contributed greatly to the design
of computer hardware and programming techniques. Mathematics also contributes more generally
to engineering, as in describing complex systems whose behavior can then be simulated by
computer. In those simulations, design features and operating conditions can be varied as a means
of finding optimum designs. For its part, computer technology has opened up whole new areas in
mathematics, even in the very nature of proof, and it also continues to help solve previously
daunting problems. Top button

Application
Mathematical processes can lead to a kind of model of a thing, from which insights can be gained
about the thing itself. Any mathematical relationships arrived at by manipulating abstract statements may
or may not convey something truthful about the thing being modeled. For example, if 2 cups of water are
added to 3 cups of water and the abstract mathematical operation 2+3 = 5 is used to calculate the total, the
correct answer is 5 cups of water. However, if 2 cups of sugar are added to 3 cups of hot tea and the same
operation is used, 5 is an incorrect answer, for such an addition actually results in only slightly more than
4 cups of very sweet tea. The simple addition of volumes is appropriate to the first situation but not to the
second—something that could have been predicted only by knowing something of the physical
differences in the two situations. To be able to use and interpret mathematics well, therefore, it is
necessary to be concerned with more than the mathematical validity of abstract operations and to also take
into account how well they correspond to the properties of the things represented.

Sometimes common sense is enough to enable one to decide whether the results of the
mathematics are appropriate. For example, to estimate the height 20 years from now of a girl who is 5' 5"

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tall and growing at the rate of an inch per year, common sense suggests rejecting the simple "rate times
time" answer of 7' 1" as highly unlikely, and turning instead to some other mathematical model, such as
curves that approach limiting values. Sometimes, however, it may be difficult to know just how
appropriate mathematical results are—for example, when trying to predict stock-market prices or
earthquakes.

Often a single round of mathematical reasoning does not produce satisfactory conclusions, and
changes are tried in how the representation is made or in the operations themselves. Indeed, jumps are
commonly made back and forth between steps, and there are no rules that determine how to proceed. The
process typically proceeds in fits and starts, with many wrong turns and dead ends. This process continues
until the results are good enough.

But what degree of accuracy is good enough? The answer depends on how the result will be used,
on the consequences of error, and on the likely cost of modeling and computing a more accurate answer.
For example, an error of 1 percent in calculating the amount of sugar in a cake recipe could be
unimportant, whereas a similar degree of error in computing the trajectory for a space probe could be
disastrous. The importance of the "good enough" question has led, however, to the development of
mathematical processes for estimating how far off results might be and how much computation would be
required to obtain the desired degree of accuracy.

Patterns in Nature - are visible regularities of form found in the natural world.
History
➢ Early Greek philosophers attempted to explain order in nature, anticipating modern concepts.
Pythagoras (c. 570–c. 495 BC) explained patterns in nature like the harmonies of music as arising
from number, which he took to be the basic constituent of existence.Empedocles (c. 494–c. 434
BC) to an extent anticipated Darwin's evolutionary explanation for the structures of organisms
➢ Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC) argued for the existence of natural universals. He considered these to
consist of ideal forms (εἶδος eidos: "form") of which physical objects are never more than
imperfect copies. Thus, a flower may be roughly circular, but it is never a perfect circle.
➢ Theophrastus (c. 372–c. 287 BC) noted that plants "that have flat leaves have them in a regular
series"; Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) noted their patterned circular arrangement.
➢ Centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) noted the spiral arrangement of leaf patterns and
that tree trunks gain successive rings as they age.
➢ Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) pointed out the presence of the Fibonacci sequence in nature, using
it to explain the pentagonal form of some flowers.
➢ In 1754, Charles Bonnet observed that the spiral phyllotaxis of plants were frequently expressed in
both clockwise and counter-clockwise golden ratio series.
➢ Mathematical observations of phyllotaxis followed with Karl Friedric Schimper and his friend
Alexander Braun's 1830 and 1830 work, respectively; Auguste Bravais and his brother Louis
connected phyllotaxis ratios to the Fibonacci sequence in 1837, also noting its appearance in
pinecones and pineapples.
➢ In his 1854 book, German psychologist Adolf Zeising explored the golden ratio expressed in the
arrangement of plant parts, the skeletons of animals and the branching patterns of their veins and
nerves, as well as in crystals.
➢ A. H. Church studied the patterns of phyllotaxis in his 1904 book.
➢ In 1917, D'Arcy Thompson published On Growth and Form; his description of phyllotaxis and the
Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical relationships in the spiral growth patterns of plants showed
that simple equations could describe the spiral growth patterns of animal horns and mollusc shells.

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➢ In 1202, Leonardo Fibonacci introduced the Fibonacci sequence to the western world with his
book Liber Abaci.
➢ Fibonacci presented a thought experiment on the growth of an idealized rabbit population.
➢ In 1658, the English physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne discussed "how Nature
Geometrizeth" in The Garden of Cyrus, citing Pythagorean numerology involving the number 5,
and the Platonic form of the quincunx pattern. The discourse's central chapter features examples
and observations of the quincunx in botany.
➢ The Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (1801–1883) formulated the mathematical problem of the
existence of a minimal surface with a given boundary, which is now named after him. He studied
soap films intensively, formulating Plateau's laws which describe the structures formed by films in
foams.
➢ Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) painted beautiful illustrations of marine organisms, in particular
Radiolaria, emphasising their symmetry to support his faux-Darwinian theories of evolution.
➢ The American photographer Wilson Bentley took the first micrograph of a snowflake in 1885.
➢ D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson pioneered the study of growth and form in his 1917 book
➢ In 1952, Alan Turing (1912–1954), better known for his work on computing and codebreaking,
wrote The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, an analysis of the mechanisms that would be needed
to create patterns in living organisms, in the process called morphogenesis.
➢ He predicted oscillating chemical reactions, in particular the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction.
These activator-inhibitor mechanisms can, Turing suggested, generate patterns (dubbed "Turing
patterns") of stripes and spots in animals, and contribute to the spiral patterns seen in plant
phyllotaxis.
➢ In 1968, the Hungarian theoretical biologist Aristid Lindenmayer (1925–1989) developed the L-
system, a formal grammar which can be used to model plant growth patterns in the style of
fractals.
➢ L-systems have an alphabet of symbols that can be combined using production rules to build larger
strings of symbols, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into geometric structures.
➢ In 1975, after centuries of slow development of the mathematics of patterns by Gottfried Leibniz,
Georg Cantor, Helge von Koch, Wacław Sierpiński and others, Benoît Mandelbrot wrote a famous
paper, How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension,
crystallising mathematical thought into the concept of the fractal.

Causes
Living things like orchids, hummingbirds, and the peacock's tail have abstract designs with a
beauty of form, pattern and colour that artists struggle to match. The beauty that people perceive in nature
has causes at different levels, notably in the mathematics that governs what patterns can physically form,
and among living things in the effects of natural selection, that govern how patterns evolve.

A. Orchids forming stripe pattern

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B. Peacock’s tail with abstract design

Mathematics seeks to discover and explain abstract patterns or regularities of all kinds. Visual
patterns in nature find explanations in chaos theory, fractals, logarithmic spirals, topology and other
mathematical patterns. For example, L-systems form convincing models of different patterns of tree
growth.
The growth patterns of certain trees resemble these Lindenmayer system fractals. The laws of
physics apply the abstractions of mathematics to the real world, often as if it were perfect. For example, a
crystal is perfect when it has no structural defects such as dislocations and is fully symmetric. Exact
mathematical perfection can only approximate real objects.Visible patterns in nature are governed by
physical laws; for example, meanders can be explained using fluid dynamics.
In biology, natural selection can cause the development of patterns in living things for several
reasons, including camouflage, sexual selection, and different kinds of signalling, including mimicry and
cleaning symbiosis. In plants, the shapes, colours, and patterns of insect-pollinated flowers like the lily
have evolved to attract insects such as bees. Radial patterns of colours and stripes, some visible only in
ultraviolet light serve as nectar guides that can be seen at a distance.

Types of Pattern
Have you ever thought about how nature likes to arrange itself in patterns in order to act efficiently?
Nothing in nature happens without a reason, all of these patterns have an important reason to exist and
they also happen to be beautiful to watch. Check out examples of some of these patterns and you may be
able to spot a few the next time you go for a walk.
Natural patterns include symmetries, trees, spirals, meanders, waves, foams, tessellations, cracks and
stripes. Early Greek philosophers studied pattern, with Plato, Pythagoras and Empedocles attempting to
explain order in nature. The modern understanding of visible patterns developed gradually over time.

A. Symmetry
Symmetry is pervasive in living things. Animals mainly have bilateral or mirror symmetry, as
do the leaves of plants and some flowers such as orchids.Plants often have radial or rotational
symmetry, as do many flowers and some groups of animals such as sea anemones. Fivefold symmetry
is found in the echinoderms, the group that includes starfish, sea urchins, and sea lilies.
Among non-living things, snowflakes have striking sixfold symmetry; each flake's structure
forms a record of the varying conditions during its crystallization, with nearly the same pattern of
growth on each of its six arms. Crystals in general have a variety of symmetries and crystal habits;
they can be cubic or octahedral, but true crystals cannot have fivefold symmetry (unlike
quasicrystals). Rotational symmetry is found at different scales among non-living things, including
the crown-shaped splash pattern formed when a drop falls into a pond, and both the spheroidal shape
and rings of a planet like Saturn.

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Symmetry has a variety of causes. Radial symmetry suits organisms like sea anemones whose
adults do not move: food and threats may arrive from any direction. But animals that move in one
direction necessarily have upper and lower sides, head and tail ends, and therefore a left and a right.
The head becomes specialised with a mouth and sense organs (cephalisation), and the body becomes
bilaterally symmetric (though internal organs need not be). More puzzling is the reason for the
fivefold (pentaradiate) symmetry of the echinoderms. Early echinoderms were bilaterally
symmetrical, as their larvae still are. Sumrall and Wray argue that the loss of the old symmetry had
both developmental and ecological causes. natural selection can cause the development of patterns in
living things for several reasons, including camouflage, sexual selection, and different kinds of
signalling, including mimicry and cleaning symbiosis. In plants, the shapes, colours, and patterns of
insect-pollinated flowers like the lily have evolved to attract insects such as bees. Radial patterns of
colours and stripes, some visible only in ultraviolet light serve as nectar guides that can be seen at a
distance.

Animal often show mirror or bilateral

symmetry, like this cat.
B. Trees, Fractals

Fractals are infinitely self-similar, iterated mathematical constructs having fractal dimension.
Infinite iteration is not possible in nature so all 'fractal' patterns are only approximate. For example,
the leaves of ferns and umbellifers (Apiaceae) are only self-similar (pinnate) to 2, 3 or 4 levels. Fern-
like growth patterns occur in plants and in animals including bryozoa, corals, hydrozoa like the air
fern, Sertularia argentea, and in non-living things, notably electrical discharges. Lindenmayer system
fractals can model different patterns of tree growth by varying a small number of parameters
including branching angle, distance between nodes or branch points (internode length), and number of
branches per branch point.

Fractal-like patterns occur widely in nature, in phenomena as diverse as clouds, river networks,
geologic fault lines, mountains, coastlines, animal coloration, snow flakes, crystals, blood vessel
branching, actin cytoskeleton, and ocean waves.

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Fern-like fractal growth pattern

C. Spirals

Spirals are common in plants and in some animals, notably molluscs. For example, in the
nautilus, a cephalopod mollusc, each chamber of its shell is an approximate copy of the next one,
scaled by a constant factor and arranged in a logarithmic spiral. Given a modern understanding of
fractals, a growth spiral can be seen as a special case of self-similarity.

Plant spirals can be seen in phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, and in the
arrangement (parastichy) of other parts as in composite flower heads and seed heads like the
sunflower or fruit structures like the pineapple and snake fruit, as well as in the pattern of scales in
pine cones, where multiple spirals run both clockwise and anticlockwise. These arrangements have
explanations at different levels – mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology – each individually
correct, but all necessary together. Phyllotaxis spirals can be generated mathematically from
Fibonacci ratios: the Fibonacci sequence runs 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13... (each subsequent number being the
sum of the two preceding ones). For example, when leaves alternate up a stem, one rotation of the
spiral touches two leaves, so the pattern or ratio is 1/2. In hazel the ratio is 1/3; in apricot it is 2/5; in
pear it is 3/8; in almond it is 5/13. In disc phyllotaxis as in the sunflower and daisy, the florets are
arranged in Fermat's spiral with Fibonacci numbering, at least when the flowerhead is mature so all
the elements are the same size. Fibonacci ratios approximate the golden angle, 137.508°, which
governs the curvature of Fermat's spiral.
From the point of view of physics, spirals are lowest-energy configurations which emerge
spontaneously through self-organizing processes in dynamic systems. From the point of view of
chemistry, a spiral can be generated by a reaction-diffusion process, involving both activation and
inhibition. Phyllotaxis is controlled by proteins that manipulate the concentration of the plant
hormone auxin, which activates meristem growth, alongside other mechanisms to control the relative
angle of buds around the stem. From a biological perspective, arranging leaves as far apart as possible
in any given space is favoured by natural selection as it maximises access to resources, especially
sunlight for photosynthesis.

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Aloe Polyphylla succulent Australia shows spiral patterns

A whorl is a single, complete 360° revolution or turn in the spiral growth of a mollusc shell. A spiral
configuration of the shell is found in of numerous gastropods, but it is also found in shelled cephalopods
including Nautilus, Spirula and the large extinct subclass of cephalopods known as the ammonites.

D. Chaos, Flow, Meanders

In mathematics, a dynamical system is chaotic if it is (highly) sensitive to initial conditions (the

so-called "butterfly effect"), which requires the mathematical properties of topological mixing and
dense periodic orbits.

Alongside fractals, chaos theory ranks as an essentially universal influence on patterns in nature.
There is a relationship between chaos and fractals—the strange attractors in chaotic systems have a
fractal dimension. Some cellular automata, simple sets of mathematical rules that generate patterns,
have chaotic behaviour, notably Stephen Wolfram's Rule 30.

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Vortex streets are zigzagging patterns of whirling vortices created by the unsteady separation of
flow of a fluid, most often air or water, over obstructing objects. Smooth (laminar) flow starts to
break up when the size of the obstruction or the velocity of the flow become large enough compared
to the viscosity of the fluid.

Meanders are sinuous bends in rivers or other channels, which form as a fluid, most often water,
flows around bends. As soon as the path is slightly curved, the size and curvature of each loop
increases as helical flow drags material like sand and gravel across the river to the inside of the bend.
The outside of the loop is left clean and unprotected, so erosion accelerates, further increasing the
meandering in a powerful positive feedback loop.

Colorful Chaos Shells

Meanders: Snake crawling

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E. Waves, Dunes

Waves are disturbances that carry energy as they move. Mechanical waves propagate through a
medium – air or water, making it oscillate as they pass by. Wind waves are sea surface waves that
create the characteristic chaotic pattern of any large body of water, though their statistical behaviour
can be predicted with wind wave models. As waves in water or wind pass over sand, they create
patterns of ripples. When winds blow over large bodies of sand, they create dunes, sometimes in
extensive dune fields as in the Taklamakan desert. Dunes may form a range of patterns including
crescents, very long straight lines, stars, domes, parabolas, and longitudinal or seif ('sword') shapes.
Barchans or crescent dunes are produced by wind acting on desert sand; the two horns of the
crescent and the slip face point downwind. Sand blows over the upwind face, which stands at about
15 degrees from the horizontal, and falls onto the slip face, where it accumulates up to the angle of
repose of the sand, which is about 35 degrees. When the slip face exceeds the angle of repose, the
sand avalanches, which is a nonlinear behaviour: the addition of many small amounts of sand causes
nothing much to happen, but then the addition of a further small amount suddenly causes a large
amount to avalanche. Apart from this nonlinearity, barchans behave rather like solitary waves.

Ghost waves of Antartica

Sand dunes

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F. Bubbles, Foam

A soap bubble forms a sphere, a surface with minimal area — the smallest possible surface area
for the volume enclosed. Two bubbles together form a more complex shape: the outer surfaces of
both bubbles are spherical; these surfaces are joined by a third spherical surface as the smaller bubble
bulges slightly into the larger one.

A foam is a mass of bubbles; foams of different materials occur in nature. Foams composed of
soap films obey Plateau's laws, which require three soap films to meet at each edge at 120° and four
soap edges to meet at each vertex at the tetrahedral angle of about 109.5°. Plateau's laws further
require films to be smooth and continuous, and to have a constant average curvature at every point.
For example, a film may remain nearly flat on average by being curved up in one direction (say, left
to right) while being curved downwards in another direction (say, front to back). Structures with
minimal surfaces can be used as tents. Lord Kelvin identified the problem of the most efficient way to
pack cells of equal volume as a foam in 1887; his solution uses just one solid, the bitruncated cubic
honeycomb with very slightly curved faces to meet Plateau's laws. No better solution was found until
1993 when Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan proposed the Weaire–Phelan structure; the Beijing
National Aquatics Center adapted the structure for their outer wall in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

At the scale of living cells, foam patterns are common; radiolarians, sponge spicules,
silicoflagellate exoskeletons and the calcite skeleton of a sea urchin, Cidaris rugosa, all resemble
mineral casts of Plateau foam boundaries. The skeleton of the Radiolarian, Aulonia hexagona, a
beautiful marine form drawn by Ernst Haeckel, looks as if it is a sphere composed wholly of
hexagons, but this is mathematically impossible. The Euler characteristic states that for any convex
polyhedron, the number of faces plus the number of vertices (corners) equals the number of edges
plus two. A result of this formula is that any closed polyhedron of hexagons has to include exactly 12
pentagons, like a soccer ball, Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, or fullerene molecule. This can be
visualised by noting that a mesh of hexagons is flat like a sheet of chicken wire, but each pentagon
that is added forces the mesh to bend (there are fewer corners, so the mesh is pulled in).

Soap Bubbles

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Soap Foam

G. Tessellations

Tessellations are patterns formed by repeating tiles all over a flat surface. There are 17 wallpaper
groups of tilings. While common in art and design, exactly repeating tilings are less easy to find in
living things. The cells in the paper nests of social wasps, and the wax cells in honeycomb built by
honey bees are well-known examples. Among animals, bony fish, reptiles or the pangolin, or fruits
like the salak are protected by overlapping scales or osteoderms, these form more-or-less exactly
repeating units, though often the scales in fact vary continuously in size. Among flowers, the snake's
head fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris, have a tessellated chequerboard pattern on their petals. The
structures of minerals provide good examples of regularly repeating three-dimensional arrays. Despite
the hundreds of thousands of known minerals, there are rather few possible types of arrangement of
atoms in a crystal, defined by crystal structure, crystal system, and point group; for example, there are
exactly 14 Bravais lattices for the 7 lattice systems in three-dimensional space.

Starfish and Shell Tessellation Fish Tessellation on Asian Arowana

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H. Cracks

Cracks are linear openings that form in materials to relieve stress. When an elastic material
stretches or shrinks uniformly, it eventually reaches its breaking strength and then fails suddenly in all
directions, creating cracks with 120 degree joints, so three cracks meet at a node. Conversely, when
an inelastic material fails, straight cracks form to relieve the stress. Further stress in the same
direction would then simply open the existing cracks; stress at right angles can create new cracks, at
90 degrees to the old ones. Thus the pattern of cracks indicates whether the material is elastic or not.
In a tough fibrous material like oak tree bark, cracks form to relieve stress as usual, but they do not
grow long as their growth is interrupted by bundles of strong elastic fibres. Since each species of tree
has its own structure at the levels of cell and of molecules, each has its own pattern of splitting in its
bark.

Concrete Cracks

I. Spots, Stripes

Leopards and ladybirds are spotted; angelfish and zebras are striped. These patterns have an
evolutionary explanation: they have functions which increase the chances that the offspring of the
patterned animal will survive to reproduce. One function of animal patterns is camouflage; for
instance, a leopard that is harder to see catches more prey. Another function is signaling — for
instance, a ladybird is less likely to be attacked by predatory birds that hunt by sight, if it has bold
warning colors, and is also distastefully bitter or poisonous, or mimics other distasteful insects. A
young bird may see a warning patterned insect like a ladybird and try to eat it, but it will only do this
once; very soon it will spit out the bitter insect; the other ladybirds in the area will remain
undisturbed. The young leopards and ladybirds, inheriting genes that somehow create spottedness,
survive. But while these evolutionary and functional arguments explain why these animals need their
patterns, they do not explain how the patterns are formed.

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Stripey Microcanthus Strigatus Leopard

Activity No. 1: Patterns in Nature

Objectives:
At the end of the activity, the students will be able to:
a) identify the different patterns in nature;
b) enumerate and visualize some examples of pattern; and
c) create a powerpoint presentation of the results.

Materials:
Cellphone with camera, bond paper, pencil, ruler, projector,

Procedures:

1. Go around your environment (home, school, community).

2. Observe some living things and non-living things in our surrounding.
3. Take a picture on the different living or non-living things that follow a certain pattern.
4. Classify them as to what type of pattern do they belong.
5. Record, paste and tabulate all your observations below.

PICTURE
Type of pattern Reason
(Drawing/picture)

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Conclusions:
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Recommendations:
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FIBONACCI SEQUENCE

History

The Fibonacci sequence is named after its discoverer Leonardo Pisano Bogollo, who was a
famous Italian mathematician otherwise known as Fibonacci. The Fibonacci numbers were first discussed
in a book Bogollo published in 1202 titled Liber Abaci, where he described the growth of a population of
rabbits under specific conditions. The conditions stated that a pair of rabbits were needed to breed and
each pair of rabbits must mature two months before breeding more rabbits, where they were then
expected to produce a litter of one male and female rabbit. Under these conditions it was observed that to
find the total number of rabbit pairs you have for each month, you add together the number of pairs that
were alive in the preceding two months – this pattern followed the series of numbers in the Fibonacci
sequence (Fractal Foundation, 2013).
The first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each succeeding number
equates to the sum of the previous two numbers. There are infinitely many Fibonacci numbers that exist
and these numbers can be found everywhere in the world around us.
Nature is all about math. If you were to observe the way a plant grows new leaves, stems, and
petals, you would notice that it grows in a pattern following the Fibonacci sequence. Plants do not realize
that their growth follows this sequence. Rather, plants grow in the most efficient way possible – new

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leaves and petals naturally grow in spaces between old leaves, but there is always enough room left for
one more leaf or petal to grow.
Hawai‘i is filled with various tropical plants and vibrant fruits that naturally grow following the
Fibonacci sequence, such as the infamous pineapples from Dole Plantation and our state flower the
Hawaiian hibiscus. If you were to count the number of scales a pineapple has on each of its spiral, or
count the number of petals Hawai‘i’s state flower has, you would discover that it is a number in the
Fibonacci sequence. The prevalent occurrence of the Fibonacci sequence in nature allows students to see
and discover for themselves the presence of mathematics in the environment they live in.

Applying patterns in Mathematics is important in order to create sequence that involves a series
of mathematical operations. One of the example of this is the Fibonacci sequence.

Fibonacci sequence is a geometric sequence of numbers where each term is found by

multiplying the previous one by a fixed, non-zero number called the common ratio.

For example : 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,…

The next number is found by adding up the 2 numbers before it.
• The 2 is found by adding the two numbers before it (1+1)
• The 3 is found by adding the two numbers before it (1+2),
• And the 5 is (2+3),
• and so on!

Example: the next number in the sequence above is 21+34 = 55

It is that simple!

Here is a longer list:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584,
4181, 6765, 10946, 17711, 28657, 46368, 75025, 121393, 196418, 317811, ...

Can you figure out the next few numbers?

Make A Spiral

When we make squares with those widths, we get a nice spiral:

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Do you see how the squares fit neatly together?

For example 5 and 8 make 13, 8 and 13 make 21, and so on.

This spiral is found in nature!

The Rule

The Fibonacci Sequence can be written as a "Rule".

First, the terms are numbered from 0 onwards like this:

n= 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 ...

xn = 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 ...

So term number 6 is called x6 (which equals 8).

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Example: the 8th term is

the 7th term plus the 6th term:

x8 = x7 + x6

So we can write the rule:

The Rule is xn = xn-1 + xn-2

where:
• xn is term number "n"
• xn-1 is the previous term (n-1)
• xn-2 is the term before that (n-2)
Example: term 9 is calculated like this:
x9= x9-1 + x9-2

= x8 + x7

= 21 + 13

= 34

Activity No. 2

Directions. Fill in the missing values and describe the number pattern.

1. 3, 5, 8, 13, ____, ____, …

2. 34, 55, 89, 144, ____, ____, …
3. 2, 3, 5, 8, ____, ____, …

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4. 13, 21, 34, 55, ____, ____, …

5. 5, 8, 13, 21, ____, ____, …
6. 89, 144, 233, 377, ____, ____, …
7. 55, 89, 144, 233, ____, ____, …
8. 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ____, ____, …
9. 3, 10, 17, 24, 31, ____, ____, …
10. 10, 5, 25, 20, 100, ____, ____, …

Mathematics in our World