<P> In 1658, the English physician and philosopher Sir Thomas Browne discussed "how Nature Geometrizeth" in The Garden of Cyrus, citing Pythagorean numerology involving the number 5, and the Platonic form of the quincunx pattern . The discourse's central chapter features examples and observations of the quincunx in botany . </P> <P> In 1917, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860--1948) published his book On Growth and Form . His description of phyllotaxis and the Fibonacci sequence, the mathematical relationships in the spiral growth patterns of plants, is classic . He showed that simple equations could describe all the apparently complex spiral growth patterns of animal horns and mollusc shells . </P> <P> The Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (1801--1883) formulated the mathematical problem of the existence of a minimal surface with a given boundary, which is now named after him . He studied soap films intensively, formulating Plateau's laws which describe the structures formed by films in foams . </P> <P> The German psychologist Adolf Zeising (1810--1876) claimed that the golden ratio was expressed in the arrangement of plant parts, in the skeletons of animals and the branching patterns of their veins and nerves, as well as in the geometry of crystals . </P>

Pattern and numbers in nature and in the world