The Big Bang of Numbers by Manil Suri

Author:Manil Suri
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

x → 1.618x

each month.† Indeed, the predicted populations for months 12 and 13 are 144 and 233 respectively, and 233 is just about 1.618 × 144.

Does this work in real life? If you start with an actual pair of rabbits in month 1, will you get 144 pairs in month 12, as Fibonacci figured out from his sequence? Will the population start increasing by a factor of 1.618 or so each month?

It won’t. For one, rabbits aren’t born neatly in male-female pairs. For another, they won’t follow the monthly birthing rule with such machine-like precision. Different litters may be larger or smaller, pregnancies may occur later or earlier. Then there’s the whole issue of mortality—unless we have a special breed of vampire rabbits, they might not be around long enough to make the numbers work. Finding perfect Fibonacci rabbits is as impossible a task as finding a perfect physically manifested triangle.

What Fibonacci provided was a model for rabbit growth—one that, like a perfect geometric figure, is a mathematical ideal. As always, reality is more complicated. Nature has to contend with not just rabbits but their individual variations, their food supply, and the prevalence of predators who eat them. She has to fine-tune in a web of interlocking factors such as space and habitat, the heat of summers, the harshness of winters. By the time she’s woven everything into her calculations, only traces of the original model would be left—the formula would have drastically changed.

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