Fibonacci numbers - The Fingerprint of God

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I am not trying to debunk the watchmaker argument, it has been debunked by Darwin about a century ago.

I have read my posts in this thread and I never claim it not to be beautiful . but it is not godly and it is still mundane. A lot of mundane things are beautiful.







Well, the other half of what I am trying to say in this thread is this:

Fibonacci numbers are horribly overrated. Maths is full of strange numbers with strange properties that can be found in nature. All this hype about being god's signature is not deserved.

They are beautiful, but really, in maths beautiful is the norm.




That's exactly the same the same logic that is allowed to use the matrix multiplication algorithm Your claim of these formulas being more efficient than matrixes is kind of unfounded considering they are both doing the same :/

Mathematical objects such as the Fibonacci numbers are beautiful. But they are as man made as portraits by Rembrant. Both are human artifacts, both are aesthetically appealing.

ruveyn

Not sure about Vex's use of the word "mundane".

Maths, being an abstract concept, would arguably exist even if neither we nor the universe had been created.

The only thing about the beauty of maths that can reasonably be ascribed to God is the fact that he gave us the ability to perceive beauty in it.

But pi would still be discernible wherever circles existed, and arguably would exist even if there were no circles (though let's not get on to the whole 'if a tree falls in the forest' argument), and so would the fibonacci sequence. They're abstract.

That seems like a fairly unusual way to use the word 'mundane'.


Feel free to show this (as opposed to merely stating it) anytime.


I'm not contesting that.


If you calculate with matrices, you keep track of (and must calculate) one excess variable and one duplicate -- as I explained last time. If you optimize that out, you aren't really doing matrix multiplication anymore.

Just in case you didn't realise this fibonacci 'finger print of god' stuff is the latest lame idea from the creationists to disprove evolution and prove irreducible complexity after getting their butts kicked all over the court with arguments about the human eye or bacterial flagella.

Rev. Paley's argument from design is like Vampires and Zombies. It just won't stay dead.

ruveyn

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mundane

First definition.

Mathy sequences are an "earthly" thing. Like a Rembrandt painting or physics.


Like I said, many of their "magical properties" come from fibonacci being a linear recurrence.

In fact, I think I have found things that are certainly more beautiful than fibonacci. Fractals as a whole are all incredibly cool examples of emergent properties. Langston's ant is crazy s**t. And the fact that Pascal's triangle and Sierpinski's triangle turned out to be so relates is golden stuff.

Fibonacci keeps appearing everywhere, but so does Euler's number.

This left me more confused than before. How can you call something mathematical earthly?


The 'magic properties' of many fractals come from the equations that define them. I just don't see why I should be bothered by this. What does it matter that a property is 'really' about something else? That a mathematical property exists just means that a true statement can be said about something, and it isn't the 'property' but the true statement that matters.

I don't doubt that there are many property statements that can be rephrased as a 'property' of something else, I just don't see why it's worth worrying about.


Interesting. I hadn't seen that one before.


Is this supposed to be a point against the Fibonacci numbers or for them?

Ummmmm, the Fibonacci numbers describe a pattern which does occur in nature. That is what we are talking about here: Naturally existing patterns describable mathematically.

That's a bit silly considering that Fibonacci created his sequence exactly so that he could describe a natural pattern.

Fine.

God put the fibonacci sequence into nature.
And we all can get smoke pot and contemplate the beauty of it.


But this same God ALSO created Pi.

Why did he play THAT nasty practical joke on us?

When God invented the circle why didnt he make it so that the circumphrence of a circle was exactly three times its diameter?

Instead - he made it so that it is that nasty irrational number that starts with 3.14, and goes on forever without any recognizable pattern creating headaches for the human race since the beginning of time.

You cant stand in awe of the fibonacci sequence without getting a Pi in your face, I say!

Numbers are abstractions, hence they are human made artifacts.

In a cosmos with no sentient beings there are no abstractions.

Just atoms and energy.

ruveyn

I don't think that's actually the case. Fibonacci numbers were stated as a way of predicting rabbit population, but I think that was window-dressing, rather than the intent behind them. Rabbits don't live forever, and don't have a fixed number of offspring at fixed intervals.


This makes no sense to me.

[/quote] Mathematics don't exist in nature. We can only abstract stuff we found in nature through mathematics.

The idea that there is something magical about Fibonacci numbers just because they have been found in more than one context is what makes them horribly overrated in my view. A lot of mathematical things show up in plenty of context. There is nothing very special in that feature.