Читать книгу Down to the River and Up to the Trees: Discover the hidden nature on your doorstep - Sue Belfrage - Страница 21

There’s something especially satisfying about patterns and geometric shapes that occur naturally. Think of the five pips arranged in a pentagon at an apple’s core or the perfect hexagon of a bee’s cell in a honeycomb – a shape as strong in construction as it is lovely to look at.

Another well-known example is the shell of the sea mollusc known as the nautilus, which grows in a logarithmic spiral, whereby each new chamber of its shell is bigger than the last one by a constant factor. This pattern is similar to the mathematical Fibonacci series, in which each number is the sum of the two that precede it (e.g. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8). Snails and many other molluscs build their shells in a similar way.

Other naturally occurring shapes and patterns include waves, lines and tessellations. Imagine the ripples of sand on the beach where the tide has recently gone out, or the sleek, overlapping scales of a fish. On a particularly freezing day, ice flowers of frost can form in fractals – geometrical patterns repeated on every scale – on window glass.

Look for signs of nature’s symmetry and note down or sketch what you see.