Nature is unstoppable and beautiful at the same time. The natural world has stunning patterns that can be described with mathematics. How beauty emerges can be explained by math.
This is how math is often described, as a language that humans created to describe the world around them.
There is a school of thought that says mathematics underpins the fundamental laws of the physical world and that nature follows the same simple rules time and time again.
Sam Baron of the Australian Catholic University said that math existed in nature before humans.
Baron writes that it is unlikely that mathematics is something we've created.
Baron and others suggest that if we think of math as an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world, it might prompt us to reconsider our place in it.
The images are from Westend61
A world made of math.
The first to identify mathematics as a language that can explain the architecture of nature was Greek philosopher Pythagoras. Baron says that he thought the Universe was made of mathematics.
Scientists are still trying to understand where and how mathematical patterns emerge in nature to answer some big questions, like why cauliflowers look oddly perfect.
"We spent a lot of time counting the cauliflowers, trying to understand how they grow," wrote University ofNottingham mathematician Etienne Farcot, who studied cauliflower growth in an effort to understand.
Some cauliflowers are also found in the blood vessels and the rings of the moon. The self-similarity that can be created by the shapes of frontals is infinitely deep.
Mandelbrot set in a continuously colored environment. The CC BY-SA 3.0 is a work by Wolfgang Beyer.
Nature comes pretty close to perfect fractals, even though only mathematical or computer-generated ones are truly perfect.
Thomas Britz is a mathematician at the University of New South Wales in Australia. lightning strikes in our blood vessels.
Wikimedia Commons has a description of theVerboseDreamer.
Part of the charm of fractals is that they help to explain how complexity is born out of simplicity. The Polish-born mathematician Benot Mandelbrt said in 2010 that "Bottomless wonders spring from simple rules which are repeated without end."
The landscape has near- perfect fractal patterns carved into it by river systems.
Archaeologists looked for missing fractals to deduce ancient Egyptians might have modified river channels when building pyramids nearby.
Lake Erepecu and Trombetas River are in Brazil. The NASA Earth Observatory.
The insects seem to follow mathematical principles.
Thomas Hales, an American mathematician, showed in 1999 that bees build hexagonal honeycomb in a way that produces the most storage space using the least materials.
The life cycle of some species of cicadas is geared towards prime numbers. Scientists think that the trick of cicadas emerging from their underground burrows every 13 or 17 years helps them avoid being attacked.
ggyn Pomerleau/Unsplash
Nature's favorite numbers are the ones where the sum of the previous two are the number in the sequence. There are numbers in pine cones and pineapples.
The spiral galaxies and nautilus shells are similar to golden spirals because they grow in a logarithmic ratio.
Recent discoveries suggest that the connection between math and nature runs deeper still, even though mathematical patterns are everywhere to be seen in nature.
James L. Amos is the photographer.
The law of nature was discovered earlier this year by researchers, who described it as a growth pattern which describes how pointed shapes form again and again in nature.
The diversity of animals and plants that follow this rule is staggering, according to evolutionary biologists.
It was found almost everywhere we looked, in living animals and those that were extinct for millions of years.
The formula for Pi, the constant ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter, was found in hydrogen atoms.
The discovery leads us back to the idea that mathematics provides a framework for the physical world. It's an interesting idea, but only if your head doesn't explode.
