In October 2007, a group of boys went to the national Gifted and Talented conference in London. The conference consisted of several lectures on a variety of topics; Maths in Nature, Justice and Punishment and Nanotechnology. Each was presenting to us different ideas and angles on commonly held beliefs and concepts; they challenged our understanding of what we thought was and wasn’t. Things which seem certain and solid in physics as we know it, for example, turn out to completely un-true on a nano level. Learning about exploding nano-cells within the body as a treatment for cancer certainly made us think.

We learned that nature is not so random and seemingly ‘made up on the spot’ as it seems; it turns out that the Fibonacci sequence is everywhere. The Fibonacci sequence goes 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 20, 33, 53 etc. We were told that this sequence appears in how many leaves are on a shoot of a plant as it grows etc. We also discovered the golden number or proportion played a part in absolutely everything; it determined the proportions of our bodies, parts within the body, our limbs and what we as human beings deem to be attractive or beautiful. Even A4 paper conforms to this golden ratio of 1.61803399.

Byron Ramesh