Did you know?
Count the spirals on a sunflower's seed head and you often get special numbers like 34 and 55. They belong to a famous number pattern called the Fibonacci sequence.
Snowflakes have six sides or six arms. That's because tiny bits of water (water molecules) lock together in a six-sided pattern when they freeze.
No two tigers have the same stripes. Each pattern is as special as a fingerprint! Scientists use camera photos of stripes to tell wild tigers apart and count them.
Try this: Pattern Builder
What comes next: 1, 4, 9, 16, ___? Hint: check how much the numbers grow each time. Now build your own pattern with buttons, leaves or bottle caps, like 1 cap, then 3 caps, then 5 caps. Ask a family member to guess your rule!
Show answer
25. The numbers grow by 3, then 5, then 7, then 9.
Go further: The Rabbit Pattern
In the Fibonacci sequence, each number is the sum of the two before it: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13… In 1202, the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) wrote about it using a puzzle about rabbit families. But Indian scholars like Pingala and Hemachandra knew these numbers much earlier! They found them while counting rhythms made of long and short beats in Sanskrit poetry. Can you find the next three numbers?