As their results began to crystallize, at first they didn’t notice the striking patterns emerging. But a colleague who reviewed their work spotted the famed Fibonacci numbers—a list whose entries have ...

Trying variants of a simple mathematical rule that yields interesting results can lead to additional discoveries and curiosities. The numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, and 55 belong to a famous ...

Pine cones. Stock-market quotations. Sunflowers. Classical architecture. Reproduction of bees. Roman poetry. What do they have in common? In one way or another, these and many more creations of nature ...

Fourteen years ago, the mathematicians Dusa McDuff and Felix Schlenk stumbled upon a hidden geometric garden that is only now beginning to flower. The pair were interested in a certain kind of oblong ...

After dividing 1 by 999-quattuordecillion (a number that’s 48 integers long), you get the Fibonacci sequence presented in neat, 24-digit strings. Here’s why that ...

Adam Hayes, Ph.D., CFA, is a financial writer with 15+ years Wall Street experience as a derivatives trader. Besides his extensive derivative trading expertise, Adam is an expert in economics and ...