Lesson 2.

The Nature of Math

Section 1.2. A study of Patterns and Numbers in the Nature of the World
 a) 4 b) 5 c) 6 d) 7

SYMMETRY
Definition
Symmetry indicates that you can draw an imaginary line across an object and the resulting parts
are mirror of each other.
Example 1. The butterfly is symmetric about the axis indicated by the black line. Note that the left
and right portions are exactly the same. This type of symmetry is called bilateral symmetry

Example 2. Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man shows the proportion and symmetry of the human
body.
Example 3. There are other types of symmetry depending on the number of sides or faces that symmetrical

Note that if you rotate the starfish in Figure 3 by 720, you can still achieve the same appearance as the original
position. This is known as the rotational symmetry. The smallest measure of angle that a figure can be rotated
while still preserving the original position is called angle of rotation. A more common way of describing rotational
symmetry is by order of rotation.

Example
As seen in figure 4, the pattern on the snowflakes repeat six times, indicating that there is a 6-fold symmetry. Using
the above formula, the angle of rotation is 60 degrees.

Do you wonder why bees used hexagon in making honeycomb and not any other polygons? The reason is that more
area will be covered using hexagon compared to other polygons. The following computation proves this.
Example:
According to Alan Turing, a British Mathematician, the formation of hyena’s spots and a tiger stripes is governed by a
set of equations. What Tring proposed was that there are two chemicals interacting inside the embryo of an animal.
He did not know what these chemicals were, so he named them morphogens and proposed that they reacted with
each other and diffused through the embryo according to a system of reaction-diffusion equations.

Example
 Fibonacci numbers on flowers and nautilus shell
 Mathematics used to model population growth with the formula