Canterbury Tales (13)
Aha, so this post has a Fibonacci number in the heading. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, … we could go ad infinitum. The Fibonacci sequence seems to be written into the world around us, embedded in mathematics, geometry, nature, art, acoustics, architecture etc. Basically, it’s about growth and learning from what we found out before to get a new piece of information.
Here at the University of Kent, there live thousands of students and rabbits. Evidently more of the latter. Rabbits are the animals Fibonacci originally used to explain his sequence of numbers in the 13th century. So while in Kent, watching all those bunnies hopping around, Gigiola Delmonte, an Italian maths teacher, gave us this puzzle to illustrate the Fibonacci sequence. Thank you Gigiola.
Imagine we put a pair of rabbits in a field and they can reproduce after one month. At the end of the first month they mate but there is still only one pair. And then each month they produce a pair. So at the end of the second month there are two pairs in the field. At the end of the third month, the original pair produces a second pair, and their previous offspring become reproductive, making three pairs in all. And on it goes. The problem to solve is for those mathematically inclined:
Provided there are no foxes around, and no diseases, how many pairs will there be in one year?