NB. I was sent this book as a review copy.
From Princeton University Press
Take a pinecone and look at it from above. You will find that there are two ways of following the spirals on the pinecone:
Count the number of each spiral color, and most often, these numbers will correspond to Fibonacci numbers. This spiral formation pattern, known as parastichy, repeats widely across the botanical world and remained beyond human understanding for millennia.
Though not structured as such, this book feels like a mystery novel, in a way I hadn’t expected but thoroughly enjoyed. The story explores the appearance of Fibonacci numbers in the patterns of many plants, raising the question of how these numbers come about. The title, of course, hints that plants, in displaying mathematical structure, might seem to “know” math. The punchline arrives at the end, but the journey toward it is a beautiful exploration of research spanning the last two thousand years—from the first studies by the ancient Greeks on phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem), through China, Rome, India, Italy, and onward into the modern era, where complex systems science, genetics, information theory, computational modeling, and more bring us closer to understanding how spiral formations encode this mathematics.
See here for a lovely blogpost going over the basics of plant parastichy, by Sura Jeselsohn.
The book follows a mostly chronological structure, tracing the various research paths pursued to uncover this mystery. It never shies away from the mathematics, and the illustrations throughout are stunning—from photographs of plants exhibiting parastichy to historical and microscopic images—which gradually lead us to our current understanding of this phenomenon involving dynamical systems, cell-packing, and more.
Unusually, the book has four authors (Stéphane Douady, Jacques Dumais, Christopher Golé, and Nancy Pick), each approaching the problem from a different perspective, whose research is intertwined within the book to bring together the threads toward the conclusion. These varied perspectives work well together, with parts of the book presented as arguments and insights from individual voices.
If I have one small critique of the book, it’s an important one. At one point, a breakthrough from two Japanese researchers is noted, but as far as I could tell, their names are never given. This is unfortunate, as most other research within the book is attributed personally.
That being said, this is a beautiful book, accessible to mathematically inclined biologists, biologically interested mathematicians, and likely many in between (myself included).
Leave a Reply