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.