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Nature 417, 595 (6 June 2002) | doi:10.1038/417595a

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Plant mathematics: Fibonacci's flowers

Amar J. S. Klar1

The spiral arrangements of leaves on a stem, and the number of petals, sepals and spirals in flower heads during the development of most plants, represent successive numbers in the famous series discovered in the thirteenth century by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, in which each number is the sum of the previous two (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55...). Seeds on the heads of sunflowers, for example, are arranged in two sets of spiral rows, one curving to the left and the other to the right.