Proceedings of Bridges 2019: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture
Pages 155–162
Regular Papers
Abstract
For any positive irrational number Ο, the arithmetic Ο flower πΟ = {n(cos2ΟΟn, sin2ΟΟn)|n>0, nββ€}. When Ο = Ο, the golden mean, and the scaling factor n is replaced with βn, it is well-known that the seed arrangements of the ideal sunflower is modeled by the points in πΟβand that the seeds appear to sort themselves into a family of fn radially symmetric spirals, where fn is the nth Fibonacci number, for any n β₯ 1. A similar phenomenon occurs for Ο in general; and we outline how to construct πΟ of multiple coronas consisting of successively larger numbers of petals qj corresponding to fractions pj/qj that are good approximations to Ο, as integer j increases. Lastly, given a flower πΟ where Ο is unknown, we reverse engineer the process and recover the good approximations for Ο that are implicitly evident within the flower.