Tuesday 2 November 2010

One of the wonders of nature

Looking too good to eat, marvel at the swirling geometry of this Romanesco broccoli... fractals in food. According to Wikipedia: 'The head of Romanesco broccoli is a visually striking example of an approximate fractal in nature. The pattern is only an approximate fractal since the pattern eventually terminates when the feature size becomes sufficiently small. In computer graphics, its pattern has been modelled as a recursive helical arrangement of cones.' And the number of spirals is a Fibonacci number. You can read the definition of Fibonacci number here, but although I'm good at functional maths, I stopped at O level.