Wednesday 1 August 2012

enumerative combinatorics - Which came first: the Fibonacci Numbers or the Golden Ratio?

The answer for either of these is "hundreds of millions of years" due to their emergence/use in biological development programs, the self-assembly of symmetrical viral capsids (the adenovirus for example), and maybe even protein structure. Because of their close relationship I'd be hard pressed to say which 'came first'.



If you google for it, you'll find plenty of books and papers. However, be extremely careful about examples without a well-explained functional role... there are an arbitrarily large number of coincidences out there if you're looking for them, and humans excel at numerology.

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