Son of Timatollah

For your ears...

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

That's an instance of a poem where the number of syllables per line is specified by Fibonacci's sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...; i.e., the first two lines each have one syllable, and each subsequent line has as many syllables as the sum of the number of syllables on the two lines it follows. That's a fib. (If you're a stickler that the first two items in the Fibonacci sequence are zero and one, then consider the initial line of the poem above to be blank.)

The fib above is from this post by Gregory K. (Sounds like a character in a Kafka novel.) Here's another post on the same topic, recently linked to by Slashdot. The comments to both posts include numerous fibs. Here's a fun one:

Kirk
James
Captain
Has a bad
Speech impediment
Talks like this all the freaking time

Fibonacci's sequence is intimately related to the Golden Ratio. Whether there will be a role for the Golden Ratio in Fibonacci Poetry has, as far as I know, not been commented on yet, except for the passing reference to spirals in Gregory K.'s fib above.

Fibonacci, himself, brought Arabic numerals to Europe. He's buried in the Cathederal at Pisa. I have a picture of his tomb somewhere, and I will try to remember to post it.

p.s. Fittingly, April is both National Poetry Month and Math Awareness Month. It's two, two, two months in one!