Flowers follow mathematical sequences that make them pleasing to the eye.
If you were to ask mathematicians why they are so passionate about their subject, a good number of them would start telling you about its beauty. The kind of beauty that mathematicians delight in goes unnoticed by most people – it can take a lot of time and effort to appreciate this beauty. But perhaps the same could also be said about the kind of beauty we delight in as Catholics, for if everyone could see the beauty in the lives of the saints and in Christian art, then the whole world would probably convert to Catholicism. But so often, the beauty of our Catholic faith goes unnoticed.
But on the other hand, there is beauty that can easily be seen. Take flowers, for instance. It is because flowers are so clearly beautiful that we give them to the people we love. During the month of May, there is a tradition of crowning statues of Our Lady with flowers. A statue of Our Lady is obviously not Our Lady herself, but by crowning her statue with something that is clearly beautiful, the Catholic faithful draw attention to Our Lady’s hidden beauty that can only be seen with the eyes of faith.
But the flowers themselves can also have a hidden beauty. For consider a sunflower and the spiral formation of its seeds. If you look carefully, you can see lots of interlocking spirals. If you just focus around the centre, you’ll only see a few spirals, but as you look further out from the centre you’ll see more and more spirals. In a fully developed sunflower, when you count the number of spirals around the edge of the flower, you’ll find that there are 34 spirals going round in one direction and 55 spirals going round in another direction. These two numbers, 34 and 55, belong to an infinite sequence of numbers called the Fibonacci sequence named after filius Bonacci, the 12th-century son of a merchant, who learnt about these sequences from his Muslim schoolmaster when he was living with his father in Algeria. The first few numbers in the sequence are 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 … This sequence has the property that every number in it (apart from the first two) is the sum of the preceding two numbers. But it is not just in sunflowers that Fibonacci numbers appear. The number of petals of many flowers are often Fibonacci numbers. For instance, enchanter’s nightshade has 2 petals, an iris has 3 petals, a buttercup has 5 petals, a delphinium has either 5 or 8 petals, chamomile has 13 petals, and an aster has 21 petals. Not every flower has a Fibonacci number for its number of petals, but very often the number of petals will belong to a sequence that has the same property as the Fibonacci sequence, where the numbers in the sequence are equal to the sum of the two preceding numbers.
Around the 17th century, Johannes Kepler and others started to notice other interesting properties of the Fibonacci sequence. For instance, the further along the Fibonacci sequence you go, the closer the ratio of two consecutive Fibonacci numbers gets to the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio, with its special aesthetic appeal, has been used by architects and artists for millennia. The ubiquity of the Golden Ratio is overlooked by most of us – we just see something that is pleasing to the eye. But the fact that there are these mathematical principles that underlie so many different things is a source of great wonder. There is so much beauty in our world on so many different levels.
Trying to specify exactly what it is that makes something beautiful is very difficult, but it often seems to have something to do with the interplay between unity and multiplicity. Mathematicians speak of beauty when they recognise some deep unifying principle that can explain many different things. The person who lives a beautiful life will have a story consisting of many different events which together form a united whole in which their lives make sense. A beautiful community has a unity to it in which the people respect each other’s individuality. But whatever it is that characterises beauty, Our Lady exemplifies it. Her openness to the Incarnate Word means that we can enter into a beautiful relationship with our Trinitarian God who is a multiplicity of three persons united in one divinity. It is therefore very fitting that we should crown Our Lady with flowers in recognition of the beauty we see with the eyes of faith.
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