[DivineNathicana]

Hey guys, I need to turn a science fair project in by the end of May, and I still haven't come up with what to do...

Since I'm taking Biology right now, I am forced to make my project biological. I was thinking about doing something with Phyllotaxis, or the study of the arrangements of leaves, petals and seeds in plants and relative to each other. It's kind of interesting how the leaves, seeds, and petals form at an angle of Phi away from each other and how the seeds of plants like sunflowers form parastichies, or winding spirals in opposite directions. The numbers of such spirals (in each of the two directions) are consecutive Fibonaccis.

It's an interesting topic but I have no idea what to do... There has to be a question that I have to answer by conducting an experiment.

Please help?

Thanks in advance,

Alisa

[Tormod]

Originally Posted by DivineNathicana

There has to be a question that I have to answer by conducting an experiment.

Maybe keep it simple:

Theory: The distribution of branches on a tree, and arrangement of leaves and seeds on sunflowers, are based on the value of phi.

Experiment: Observe X amount of trees and sunflowers, measure distribution, verify/falsify theory.

Conclusions: (Now here you're on your own)

[UncleAl]

Google
"Scientific American" "Fibonacci" phi 405 hits
"Scientific American" "Fibonacci" sunflower 114 hits
"Scientific American" "Fibonacci" "tree branches" 9 hits

"Scientific Amercan is not an acceptable literature citation. It will get you started, and then you can proceed to more scholarly stuff.

http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/abop/abop-bm.pdf
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/proje...c/bib/lsys.bib
(despite crappy page formatting)

[DivineNathicana]

I was planing to maybe grow a few plants normally and a few with strings attached to their leaves preventing them from forming golden angles. However, I don't know of a good enough "protractor" that could measure angles accurately enough to get this to work: just .02 degrees produces an entirely different pattern, so I need to be able to measure that accurately. Anyone know anything I can use?

Thanks,
Alisa

[Fishteacher73]

Perhaps a simple analysis of leaf surface area to phi ratio... There might be a specific correlation.

[DivineNathicana]

Like, measuring if leaf area is related to divergence angle? I think measuring leaf area would be even harder than measuring the divergence angle haha.

[C1ay]

Have you looked at +biology +"golden ratio"

[Turtle]

___Sufficient math references above, but I wish to note tying the leaves is not changing the biological constraint to phylotaxy. If you stop training a bonsai & plant it in the ground, it will resume normal growth.
___Now genetically altering a plant to consistantly grow is some other "math' pattern, that would be an experiment.