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Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature by Sarah C. Campbell

Oct28

What are Fibonacci numbers? Who was Fibonacci? Why does the Fibonacci number pattern appear in sunflowers, pineapples, and even the spirals of a nautilus shell?

This book, illustrated with photographs taken by the author and her husband, Richard Campbell, answers the first question and the second (in the end section, called. “More about Fibonacci Numbers”), but the third question of why remains a mystery. The pattern for Fibonacci sequence is: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . . Each Fibonacci number in the sequence is the sum of the two numbers before it in the pattern. Leonardo Fibonacci was the Italian mathematician who first wrote about this fascinating number pattern.

The book starts out easy with pictures of flowers that display the Fibonacci numbers. The reader is told to count the flower petals, which turn out to be a number equal to one of the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. Most flowers have a Fibonacci number of petals, although some do not. Then it gets more complicated.

Pinecones, pineapples, and sunflowers also display Fibonacci numbers, but these are found in the number of spirals in the pinecone, or in the center of the sunflower, or in the pineapple skin. I truly had trouble counting and understanding the spirals, even though the photographs were clear and even had the spirals numbered.

Then we get to the growth of the spiral on a nautilus shell. This growth can also be expressed in a Fibonacci number sequence. I think I understood this one, but it’s complicated and might be hard to explain to children. I’m not sure the book does an adequate job of explaining (or maybe I just didn’t do a great job of understanding).

I would pair this book with the picture book biography, Blockhead: the Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese. Blockhead tells the story of how Fibonacci discovered the numbers sequence that is now named for him as well as popularized the use of Arabic numerals in the West. Even though people thought he was a head-in-the-clouds blockhead, Leonardo Fibonacci is now known as the “greatest Western mathematician of the Middle Ages.”

These two books together give a much more enlightening introduction to Fibonacci numbers than does either book on its own. The photographs in the first book, Growing Patterns, are vivid and helpfully labeled and numbered. The story of Fibonacci’s mathematical obsession and the diagrams that illustrate the numerical sequence are good for creating more interest and for helping children (and adult like me) understand the fun of finding and counting Fibonacci numbers. After reading both books, you could spend a lot of time discovering Fibonacci numbers in nature: in flowers, lemons, apples, leaves, shells, waves and other natural and even man-made objects. Or you could let your children discover more of these numbers for themselves after you have introduced them using these picture books, if they are interested. Spread the feast and see who partakes of the wonder.

Sir Cumference and the Fracton Faire by Cindy Neuschwander

Mar13

Is it didactic, a story built specifically to teach a lesson about fractions? Absolutely.

Do some of us prefer our mathematics lessons encased in a story? Yes, indeed.

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And for some people, math equals medicine.

The Sir Cumference books are designed to engage young readers who like knights and ladies fairs and castles and to teach them a bit of math on the sly, so to speak. This latest Sir Cumference book is all about fractions. Sir Cumference and Lady Di of Ameter go to visit their friend the Earl of Fracton at the annual Fracton Faire. At the fair, they purchase cloth and cheese and other stuff in fractional parts, and a group of thieves target the market. However, the Earl and Lady Di and Sir Cumference use fractions to catch the bandits.

The ending is a bit lame. (The thieves get away, but the loot they took from the merchants at the fair is recovered.) Everyone lives happily ever after, and fractons later become known as fractions. Nevertheless, this story would be a memorable and gentle introduction to or review of the subject of simple fractions.

Other Sir Cumference books are:
Sir Cumference and All the King’s Tens (in my library)
Sir Cumference and the First Round Table (in my library)
Sir Cumference and the Roundabout Battle
Sir Cumference and the Viking’s Map
Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi
Sir Cumference and the Isle of Immeter
Sir Cumference and the Great Knight of Angleland
Sir Cumference and the Sword in the Cone
Sir Cumference and the Off-the-Charts Dessert

Another “living math” picture book that I picked up at the used bookstore is The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns. (Ms. Burns wrote two of the books in the Brown Paper School series, Math for Smarty Pants and The I Hate Mathematics Book!, and her name is on a series of math education books from Scholastic for preschool and primary readers, Marilyn Burns brainy day books.) The Greedy Triangle is about a triangle with a busy life who nevertheless becomes bored with doing the same old triangular things. With the help of a shapeshifter, our triangle tries out life as a quadrilateral, a pentagon, and a hexagon, then several other shapes all the way up to a decagon. But, of course, then the old life of a triangle starts to look good, and our shape-shifting shape asks for one last change.

I think this kind of “didacticism” is a just fine. Stories make math so much more interesting. Then again, I was usually the only one in my math classes who actually liked story problems best. Unadorned numbers make me cringe.

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