Trying variants of a simple mathematical rule that yields interesting results can lead to additional discoveries and curiosities. The numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and 55 belong to a famous ...

Pine cones. Stock-market quotations. Sunflowers. Classical architecture. Reproduction of bees. Roman poetry. What do they have in common? In one way or another, these and many more creations of nature ...

Though generations of schoolchildren have cursed arithmetic, the world was a much more inconvenient place without it. Before the advent of modern arithmetic in the 13th century, basic calculations ...

As their results began to crystallize, at first they didn’t notice the striking patterns emerging. But a colleague who reviewed their work spotted the famed Fibonacci numbers—a list whose entries have ...

Here's a hypothetical and idealized question about rabbits, first posed by Leonardo di Pisa in 1202 (Leonardo is more commonly known as Fibonacci). There's a pair of rabbits in an enormous field. At ...

A variation of a puzzle called the “pick-up sticks problem” asks the following question: If I have some number of sticks with random lengths between 0 and 1, what are the chances that no three of ...

This story is free to read because readers choose to support LAist. If you find value in independent local reporting, make a donation to power our newsroom today. Listen 4:44 Though generations of ...