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Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick and Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick and Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies.
It’s not often someone suggests that knowing some math could make you the life of the party, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Yes, a properly timed delivery of a few fun facts about the famed Fibonacci sequence just might leave your friends clamoring for more—because it really is that cool. So, without further ado, let’s continue our exploration of sequences that we began a few articles ago by jumping right in and talking about Fibonacci’s famous sequence.
Review of Mathematical Sequences
As we’ve discussed, sequences in math are fairly simple things—they’re just lists of numbers arranged in some particular order. The number of sequences that can be written is infinite since any random list of numbers will do. But some types of sequences are decidedly non-random—one of which being the geometric sequence. In such a sequence, each element is obtained from the previous one by multiplying it by the same fixed number. For example: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, is a geometric sequence where each successive element is obtained by multiplying the previous one by 2.
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6 Comments
Add CommentIt was really interesting!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI had heard about Fibonacci sequence in high school and also I had wrote It's program in some programming languages such as java and C, but I didn't know it's story.
As it was mentioned in the article :"it’s a beautiful application of how a bit of simple math can model the very complex world."
"What are generally referred to as the Fibonacci numbers and the method for their formation were given by Virahanka (between a.d. 600 and 800), Gopala (prior to a.d. 1135) and Hemacandra (c. a.d. 1150), all prior to L. Fibonacci (c. a.d. 1202). Narayana Pandita (a.d. 1356) established a relation between his samasika-pankti, which contains Fibonacci numbers as a particular case, and “the multinomial coefficients.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHistoria Mathematica, Volume 12, Issue 3, August 1985, Pages 229–244.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0315086085900217
I'll bet that at least a few dozen nameless individuals played around with the sequence at various times during many centuries prior to the births of every person you named.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyes.you are right.of course i am learning about Fibonacci sequence and it is so different with the other Numerical sequence,and some times it is hard to make Mathematical relationship for it.By the way i know a little about c++ and know how to it works with it if you know about java with this program tell me to know.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for your good comment.
Aoteiwolog (M.H.M)
Who said people in the stock trading uses the Fibonacci sequence in the process of decision making about what and when to buy or sell, or in making market and economy predictions? Who said it gave the same results in terms of investment revenues whether you use any kind of technical or fundamental analysis for buy and sell decissions, or just putting the names of stocks in a board, throwing darts, and buying the stock whose name was in the paper where the dart landed?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually, it's a little known fact (little known for good reason, I should add), that the first person to discover the Fibonacci Sequence was about to publish an article in a respected mathematical journal (Australopithecus Mathematica) when his head was crushed by a disgruntled rival. No word yet on whether Newton and Leibniz were involved.
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