The Renaissance--Mathematicians, Scientists and Architecture

Today, we talked about the famous mathematicians and scientists of the Renaissance period.  Ryan and Connor were busy with their first cuttings of the mow season,

We watched some videos about the buildings they constructed, the leaning tower of Pisa, and Fibonacci's numbers.  Leonardo Pisano Bigollo, most commonly known as Fibonacci, is considered the most talented  Italian mathematician of the middle ages.  He came up with a sequence of numbers that to this day many people have interest in discovering. and playing around with.     We've heard that nature, too follows this sequence and we decided to find out how common his numbers were found in nature.

We had the kids gather many specimens for our project....but it was such a beautiful day that they had a hard time staying focused on the task at hand.

....but some found a few things....

We then had them seperate the flora and fauna into the numbers they correlated with.  This is the pattern of Fibonacci's numbers:
1+1=2
1+2=3
2+3=5
3+5=8
5+8=13
8+13=21
13+21=34
and so on....

So they decided if the flowers had 1, 2 3,5, 8, 13 ect.  petals or leaves.  we found that many did, some did not.  Recently, a friend's daughter did a science fair project on this topic and found that 60-67% of the specimens she collected from 4 different area in the New River Valley did follow Fibonacci's number rule.

Afterwards we dined on our last day of scrumptious  Italian type foods...which may or may not have been served during the Renaissance.  We know they didn't have tomatoes yet, but the bread noodles and pesto sure may have.