The Romanesco Broccoli is a child’s worst nightmare. It is not only a vegetable but also a display of beautiful Mathematics. The stunning design — spiraling, cone-shaped patterns — of the vegetable is evident from a bird’s-eye view. These patterns approximate a fractal, a geometrical shape that has the same statistical appearance at all scale levels. You can see that each “hump” on the broccoli looks similar to the larger vegetable. Furthermore, this spiral is actually an encoding of the fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,…): the radius of each arc in the spiral progresses according to the fibonacci sequence. This intricate spiral is apparent if you follow the “humps” from the top of the broccoli to its base. The Romanesco Broccoli is more than a source of nutrition.
