Which Flower is It?
Andrew J. Simoson

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 𝓕ω = {n(cos2πωn, sin2πωn)|n>0, nβˆˆβ„€}. When Ο‰ = Ο•, the golden mean, and the scaling factor n is replaced with √n, it is well-known that the seed arrangements of the ideal sunflower is modeled by the points in 𝓕ϕ—and 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 𝓕ω 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 𝓕ω where Ο‰ is unknown, we reverse engineer the process and recover the good approximations for Ο‰ that are implicitly evident within the flower.

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