Why is the Fibonacci sequence found everywhere?
In: 2220
I already made this comment but I thought it might need its separate space.
Basically, the answer you get depends on who you ask. Ask a mathematician and you get the top comment. Ask a philosopher, and you get a reply to the mathematicians comment.
As a statistician myself, all I see is random noise making sense ever so often. Throw a bunch of large numbers into the air and there is a probability that they’ll land exactly describing your geographical coordinates. Different phenomenon just have different probabilities of happening. Doesn’t mean that there’s anything special about them. Yes, we don’t know why some things occur with a higher probability than others, but that still doesn’t grant them any special place, not more so than any other random sequence.
Now the question of significance of these patterns is quite tricky and I believe originates from the time where numerology was all everybody was taking about. Even until now, numerology keeps seeping into number theory every now and then. A somewhat similar example would be like chiropractors vs physio therapists (oops!)
In the end, it all seems from our innate desire to find meaning in all things. Which is why sometimes clouds look like objects and you can swear you saw a face on Mars that was just a rock. Our brains are hardwired to find patterns, and more often than not, we just give meaning to something that’s inherently random noise
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