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Sunflowers and Fibonacci: Models of Efficiency (2014)
The article in this week’s That’s Maths column in The Irish Times ( TM046 ) is about the maths behind the efficient packing of sunflowers and many other plants Strolling along Baggot Street in Dubl…
More than four centuries ago, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler noticed the spiral patterns on plants but no satisfactory explanation has emerged until recently. Some years ago, Dublin-born Alan Newell and Patrick Shipman at the University of Arizona applied elasticity theory to continuum models of growing cacti shoots. Recently, Newell and Matt Pennybacker (2013) have shown that the observed patterns emerge from a pattern-forming front arising from a combination of a biochemical and mechanical instabilities.
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