People think writing is important but its first use was as a way for traders to record increasingly complex business deals. Sumerian record keepers between 3500 and 3000 BCE kept themselves strictly limited to facts and figures. Our oldest record is of one called Kushim's record of his barley receipts.* 50 Shades of Grey was a way off.
Fascination with numbers over letters was dominant for approximately two further millennia.
Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician born in 1170 in Pisa. He posed a simple problem about how many rabbits there would be at any given time if gestation took a month and maturation a month. In other words he introduced a lag factor to exponential growth (2,4,8,16,32...)**
It turns out his sequence describes a lot of things in nature from petal patterns to the development of snail's shells. Da Vinci saw it as a divine proportion.
The sequence is constructed thus:
0 + 1 = 1
1 + 1 = 2
1 + 2 = 3
2 + 3 = 5
3 + 5 = 8
5 + 8 = 13
8 + 13 = 21
...and so on.
So, when you see nature, what sort of beauty do you see? God's invisible qualities inferred from what has been made (Romans 1:20)? 'Nature red in tooth and bloody in claw' (a phrase popularised by Tennyson)? Or lovely, simple mathematics?
Bitter-sweet and strange
Finding you can change
* Source - Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
** click here for source
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