Beauty of Numbers in Nature

From a zebra’s stripes to a spider’s web, from sand dunes to snowflakes, nature is full of patterns underlaid by mathematical principles.

In The Beauty of Numbers in Nature, Ian Stewart shows how life forms from the principles of mathematics. This book is an adventure into our beautiful world through a mathematician’s eye.

Each chapter in The Beauty of Numbers in Nature explores a different kind of patterning system and its mathematical underpinnings. In doing so, the book also uncovers some universal patterns both in nature and made by humans from the basic geometry of ancient Greece to the complexities of fractals.

Stewart draws on a wide range of sources to examine the mathematics of patterns: the Pythagoreans’ obsession with numbers as the philosophical basis of the universe; a great mathematician who wondered about how a violin makes music; a clerk in a patent office who realised that space and time can get mixed together; a maverick mathematician who questioned why nature spurns such regular geometric shapes as spheres and cylinders in favour of jagged lightning bolts, asymmetrically branching trees, and the uneven terrain of mountainsides.

The Beauty of Numbers in Nature, begins with a simple and often-asked question about the shape and individual uniqueness of snowflakes. How can such a strange mixture of regularity and irregularity exist within frozen water? How can the apparent irregularity of a leopard’s spots of zebra’s stripes have a foundation within mathematical principles?

Mathematics helps us discover nature, this video by Cristóbal Vila was inspired by numbers, geometry and nature.

In this beautiful video, “Nature by Numbers,” filmmaker Cristóbal Vila presents a series of animations illustrating various mathematic principles, beginning with an animation of the Fibonacci Sequence before moving on to the Golden Ratio, the Angle Ratio, the Delaunay Triangulation and Voronoi Tessellations. The mathematical principles sound immense, but the math is beautiful and the film serves to remind us of the intimate relationship between nature and mathematics.

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