"An interesting group participation project for the Manchester Science Fair: growing sunflowers" Includes video on Fibonacci sequences in nature with the example of sunflowers
from the abstract: "Mathematics is now at a remarkable
in exion point, with new technology radically extending the power and limits of individuals. Crowd-
sourcing pulls together diverse experts to solve problems; symbolic computation tackles huge routine
calculations; and computers check proofs too long and complicated for humans to comprehend.
The
Study of Mathematical Practice
is an emerging interdisciplinary eld which draws on philoso-
phy and social science to understand how mathematics is produced. Online mathematical activity
provides a novel and rich source of data for empirical investigation of mathematical practice - for
example the community question-answering system
mathover ow
contains around 40,000 mathe-
matical conversations, and
polymath
collaborations provide transcripts of the process of discovering
proofs. Our preliminary investigations have demonstrated the importance of \soft" aspects such as
analogy and creativity, alongside deduction and proof, in the production of mathematics, and have
given us new ways to think about the roles of people and machines in creating new mathematical
knowledge. We discuss further investigation of these resources and what it might reveal.
Crowdsourced mathematical activity is an example of a \social machine", a new paradigm, identi-
ed by Berners-Lee, for viewing a combination of people and computers as a single problem-solving
entity, and the subject of major international research endeavours. We outline a future research
agenda for mathematics social machines, a combination of people, computers, and mathematical
archives to create and apply mathematics, with the potential to change the way people do mathe-
matics, and to transform the reach, pace, and impact of mathematics research."