HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

An excellent video series by Vi Hart on Fibonacci numbers hiding in other strange places (and spirals and plants):

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOIP_Z_-0Hs

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14-NdQwKz9w

I read the article on Taylor series. I think the best evidence that it was a good explanation is that at the end, I thought, “Duh. This stuff is all obvious. When does he get to the hard part?” Note, I’d never heard of Taylor series, and I am not a savant.

Tangentially, I remember a woman explaining Fibonacci numbers in a youtube video with sunflowers and pineapples about 8 years ago. Her handle was something like “the nerd girl” or “mathchick”. I can’t seem to find it again. Does this ring bells for anyone?

Edit: I should have tried harder before asking. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

⬐ andi999

It is a good article, but actually it skipped the hard part.

⬐ Shugarl

Well, I guess it's fine. I might be wrong on this, but I always thought that the goal of this site wasn't to make you an expert on a subject, but to provide you a high-level, intuitive understanding of a subject, which then makes understanding the hard parts/the details waaay easier. (Whereas in college, we'd go straight up to the hard parts after a small introduction.)

I find this girl's analysis of Fibonacci series and the Golden Ratio concepts and seeing how it applies to plants to be fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

I wish she would edit the video and slow it down a bit (don't like that rapid fire style of tutorial that so many people YouTubers adopt lately) but the presentation is amazing.

There is an interesting series of 3 videos by vihart on the Fibonacci sequence and plants [1] that is done very well. It may interest you if you found the OP video interesting.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ahXIMUkSXX0

This reminded me of a video I had seen a while back by ViHart about spirals and nature.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

Although her target audience is probably a bit younger than the people here, I still thought someone may find it interesting, especially if they hadn't thought about it much.

Edit: Also, if you have kids interested in math and these kinds of things, they may be interested in some of the other videos on her channel. She has a interesting way of presenting ideas on a few topics.

I agree that most of these pictures are not of fractals.

I would add the lily pad, thinking cactus, cabbage and fern to the list of fractals. There are only a couple of octaves/iterations in each but there is some self similarity there.

Otherwise there are probably just a lot of Fibonacci spirals(although I haven't counted them).

For more on Fibonacci spirals see this[1] excellent video series by Vi Hart.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

See also Vi Hart's "Doodling in Math: Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant", starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0 It covers how the Fibonacci is seen in more places than it actually exists, which is closely related to the golden ratio. (This point is made at the end of part 2 and part 3 is all about it.)

Vi Hart made an excellent series of videos related to plants and Fibonacci numbers. Here is the first one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0. Links to the other ones can be found in the description.

⬐ jnotarstefano

Another excellent source on this topic is a book I cited in the code comments called "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants" by Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, available online here: http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/#abop

⬐ sitkack

This kids, is what happens when you recursively ask the question, "Why?" and and answer it seriously. Made my day.

⬐ laumars

I absolutely love Hart's presentation style in that video. It's so refreshing to see maths presented at a decent pace but still be easy to follow. And the quirkiness of the delivery only serves to make those videos more watchable.

Thank you for the recommendation. I'll definitely be subscribing to her channel :)

Vi Hart is fantastic; I recommend watching all her videos [1] (though skip the very early music-only ones if that's not your thing). Particularly good are the hexaflexagon ones [2] and the plant spiral ones [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIVIegSt81k

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

⬐ dnautics

the snail one is uh, amazing, too.

⬐ leephillips

She deserves the Nobel Prize of the internet. Her Pythagoras video[0] is one of my favorites.

I was awestruck at the end of this one, after seeing the musical shapes. A well-spent 30 minutes.

I would only disagree with her listing of Stravinsky as an "atonal" composer. Although he did mess with 12-tone composition a bit very late in his career, he is not usually thought of this way, as he very much dealt with tonality in the vast majority of his work.

[0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1E7I7_r3Cw

⬐ stephencanon

Even Stravinsky's serial compositions aren’t so much atonal as they are post-tonal. There are relatively few composers whose work can be genuinely called “atonal”.

Careful now. Computers are a similarly mindless arrangement of atoms. The only difference is that humans designed computers, and natural selection designed plants. Under your reasoning, computers are incapable of arithmetic. At that point, how are brains any different?

Perhaps that's right, but such a "pure" definition of computation is hardly useful.

More examples of plants mechanistically doing math: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

A wonderful exploration of this idea as it relates to plants by Vi Hart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

⬐ _bjn

This is brilliant. I love it when people explain mathematics like this. Just took a look at her site, will definitely be donating. Thanks for bringing this to light.

⬐ None

None

⬐ lazugod

The linked video isn't advocating anything so outlandish as intelligent design, so why does the title mention it? Also, the relationship between the golden ratio, and many spirals that occur in nature, don't actually exist (some previous discussions include http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407586 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2902496).

EDIT: Apparently the title changed.