MORE THAN JUST NUMBERS

Team Lumina

25/07/2018

While most people cannot stand the sight of numbers, it is well worth noting that mathematics plays an important role in the natural world. Just a little bit of research will yield hundreds upon hundreds of different numbers that are unique in one way or another, carrying special properties that might not be apparent at first. Let us, therefore, look at a few such interesting numbers that, while playing an important role in the making of this universe, can often leave us scratching our heads.

THE 23 ENIGMA

The first one is the number 23. Considered by many experts to be a superstition, the 23 Enigma has people noticing strange occurrences or events in nature that are related to or contain the number 23. While many believe this to be mere nonsense and the result of our own fixation with the number, there is no denying that once the evidence mounts up, there is at least some truth to the “conspiracy”. So, here are a few examples listed below to help better illustrate the matter:

There are 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human body.
The earth spins on its axis at an angle of 23.5°, the ‘0.5’ acting as a sum of 0.2 and 0.3.
The 23rd letter of the alphabet, W, has two points down and 3 up resulting in the number 23.
The Hiroshima atomic bomb was dropped on Japan on the sixth of August 1945 at 8:15 am, with 8 and 15 adding up to 23.
The foundation of evolutionary biology, Charles Darwin’s famous work ‘On the Origin of Species’ was published in 1859 (1+8+5+9=23).
Twenty-three is the smallest prime number that consists of consecutive digits.

THE FIBONACCI SEQUENCE

Perhaps the most famous sequence in the world, and one that has a very close connection to the golden ratio (discussed ahead), the Fibonnaci sequence is a diverging recursive sequence starting with the numbers 0 and 1, where the next number in the sequence is found by adding the two previous numbers. Thus, it looks something like this:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …, Un=Un-1+Un-2

Although widely credited to Fibonnaci (whose real name was Leonardo Pisano Bogollo), the sequence was known in India several centuries prior to the publication of his book, Liber Abachi, in 1212. The special thing about this sequence is the fact that the ratio of two consecutive numbers roughly equals the Golden Ratio, with the ratio getting closer to the number the larger the numbers get.

The number can be found in several areas, ranging from music to nature. For example, on a keyboard, you need exactly 8 keys to play the 8 basic tones, and between those 8 keys lie 5 black keys, which are divided in to two sets - one of 2 and the other of 3. All these numbers are part of the Fibonacci sequence. In a more clear-cut example, you can observe the sequence in the sum of the numbers in each row of the Pascal’s Triangle.

And though these instances may be seen as someone grasping at straws, the importance of the sequence is also reflected in its many real-world applications, which include the Fibonacci heap (a data structure for priority queue operations) and the Fibonacci search technique (a programming algorithm). This sequence is truly enshrouded in mystery.

PHI(Φ) OR THE GOLDEN RATIO

Unlike the number 23, this number is not only deeply rooted in nature but has been mathematically proven to be so. The number is approximately equal to 1.61803399 and is theoretically never-ending, being found in a vast multitude of ways throughout our lives. As discussed previously, the Fibonnaci sequence too is one of those ways, even if the examples more familiar to you are those of the flowers, seeds and spiralling galaxies.

The pattern that these phenomena follow is one that is closely associated with the golden ratio. From fingerprints to seashells, one can find hidden instances of spirals conforming to the sequence everywhere. Even the pyramids of Giza feature this number, with the base and height of the pyramids forming a ratio almost equal to Phi.

However, one should always take these examples with a grain of salt, considering how there is a great amount of evidence suggesting that these observations distort random occurrences to make mountains out of molehills.