I'll admit it: I *love* code. Computers are magic, and since my first taste as a 5 year old, I've been pretty well hooked on them. When I started with them, they weren't like the toaster appliances they are now, and learning to become the wizard beh...
When I was growing up, my father loved pointing out mathematical trivia in nature. High on his list was the Fibonacci sequence. Boring textbook explanation:
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If you start with 0 and 1 as the first two values of a, you get the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, ... and if you divide any value in the sequence by the previous value in the sequence, you get the Fibonacci ratio. The further along the sequence you go, the closer the ratio converges on a constant value, which is approximately 1.618 (or 0.618 if you do the division the other way around). Why does this matter? A lot of people naturally find things look good when they follow this ratio, so a rectangle where the ratio between the length of the sides is 0.618 looks subjectively better than a rectangle with a ratio of 0.8 or 0.5. A bunch of classic furniture follows this ratio - I'll give you a moment to go measure some tables or something ;)
The rectangle with that ratio is called the golden rectangle, and if you divide its area into a square and the rest, then the rest has the same ratio. If you draw a spiral connecting the dots, that's the golden spiral.
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He would show me a nautilus shell and tell me it followed the golden ratio (spoiler: it doesn't actually, although it's close). He'd show me a pine cone, and tell me the wedges of wood that make up the cone follow the spiral, and that a lot of plants follow the same pattern.
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Phyllotaxy in Aloe By Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=925941
He'd point at the sky, at night, and tell me the stars also followed that pattern. Again, a little overgeneralization never hurt anyone, right?
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Pinwheel Galaxy (a.k.a, Messier 101) By Credit:Image: European Space Agency & NASAAcknowledgements:Project Investigators for the original Hubble data: K.D. Kuntz (GSFC), F. Bresolin (University of Hawaii), J. Trauger (JPL), J. Mould (NOAO), and Y.-H. Chu (University of Illinois, Urbana)Image processing: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble)CFHT image: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/J.-C. Cuillandre/CoelumNOAO image: George Jacoby, Bruce Bohannan, Mark Hanna/NOAO/AURA/NSF - http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/html/heic0602.html (direct link)See also: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/10/image/a, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36216331
It also supposedly shows up often in stock markets, although it can be hard to differentiate some of this from mystical numerology.
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The blue/red lines follow the ratio. By Justin Kuepper http://www.investopedia.com/articles/technical/04/033104.asp
So all that stuff is cute and fluffy and fun and hints of a magical world waiting to be discovered. I really wanted to discover it. Enter dreams to be a mathematician. Except that wasn't really for me - it's amazing and wonderful but a little dry and I spent so much time learning programming and electronics and computers... But computer science is just math + computers, right?
I helped my father with the math and writing the specs for a program to help predict market trends - he had this theory that human behaviour (which, back then, drove commodity prices) was a reflection of nature, and so any big signals in nature you could find would be useful as a predictor of the market. It was fluffy as all hell, but if I've learned anything along the way, it's this: with enough signal processing you can make a duck moo.
