Science

Numbers and shapes underpin far more of our lived experience than we tend to notice, revealing deep structures that unify biology, physics, and design. In 2009, botanist Peter Stevens revisited a puzzle first discussed by Leonardo da Pisa in 1202: why do so many plants arrange their leaves in spirals that match the Fibonacci sequence? When Stevens’ team at the University of Vermont modelled growth at varying angles, they found that the classic divergence angle of 137.5 degree