Making Connections
My teen daughter doesn’t care for crosswords or the Spelling Bee, but she does try to play Connections every day. We were working on this one together a few days ago and when I suggested SNAIL GALAXY CYCLONE SUNFLOWER as a group, she said “I was thinking spirals but sunflowers are round”. Which prompted a discussion about the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio (which she’d covered in math class) and a search for videos that explained how the sequence pops up in nature and, specifically, sunflowers.
As beautiful as the sunflower is, isn’t it even lovelier knowing there is a deep mathematical order to it?
That quote reminds me of Richard Feynman’s thoughts on the beauty of nature:
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees.
I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
Games, language, mathematics, the beauty of flowers, science, time spent together — Connections indeed.
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For me, this also points back to Mark Twain's observation in Life on the Mississippi that becoming a riverboat captain requires a knowledge of the river that does affect the aesthetic appreciation of it (or at least affected his).
I found this link which summarizes the argument with the relevant text: https://thecuriouspeople.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/mark-twain-is-knowledge-the-enemy-of-beauty/
This is me responding to the preamble rather than the meat of the post, so apologies, but I cannot let any reference to the NYT's Connections game pass without mentioning it's an uncredited rip off of the Wall round from the wonderful long-running British nerd game show Only Connect. This is an archive of some of them from years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfnSN1eY0aY
And this is a fan-made version inspired by the show: https://puzzgrid.com/
(I did know Fibonacci sequences were found in sunflowers but I didn't know what that actually meant until this post, so thanks!)
Many years ago I and some colleagues designed an unrealized greenhouse for a public school here in NYC based on the fibonacci sequence.
http://are-a.net/projects/greenlab/
From @krinkle on Mastodon:
I'm obsessed with this related game called https://relatle.io/ that asks you to find the way two music artists are related through their related artists.
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