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Have you ever pulled the petals off of a daisy? If you looked closely at the center, you would have seen that it is not solid, but made up of sets of spirals radiating out from the center. And it's not just daisies. If you look at the bottom of a pinecone, it has the same kinds of spirals. Instead of going around and around in a circle, they spread out -- like fireworks. To understand the spirals in pinecones, daisies, pineapples, and many other things in nature, we can look to the mathematician Leonardo Pisano, who is better known as Fibonacci (Fib-o-nawch-ee).
Fibonacci was born in Pisa, Italy, around 1170 and was educated in North Africa. As a child, he was encouraged to study accounting, and he recognized the enormous advantages of the mathematical systems in use there. Later in his life, he would introduce Arabic Numerals (Hindu-Arabic numerals) to...