Phyllotaxis
the spirals are counted, not admired
Concept

Counting radius — where it appears

The radius, or the height, at which a spiral count was taken. It is the field a published count almost never carries and the one this collection's survey specification asks for first, because a pair without it names no annulus.

Named by 7 essays across 3 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

A count of m and n pins the divergence to 221°/mn. Each dot is one reported pair, and its height is the total width of the divergence angles that could have produced it at some rise. 2/3 leaves 38.8° open; 34/55 leaves 0.118°. The line is 221°/mn, taken from the three highest pairs and drawn back through the rest.

What a count is worth

A reported parastichy pair pins the divergence angle to a band 221°/mn wide — so 2 and 3 says almost nothing and 34 and 55 fixes it to a tenth of a degree. Each step up the Fibonacci sequence is worth a factor of φ², and recording the radius a pair was counted at adds only ten per cent.

wrong · Count value Every open question here needs under 34 specimens. The sample size at which each comparison reaches 90 per cent power at a 5 per cent false-positive rate, from the exact binomial rather than a normal approximation. The census question — do plants show consecutive Fibonacci pairs far more often than the geometry does — needs 4: 14.7% is the share of divergence angles giving a consecutive Fibonacci pair at a fine rise; 90% is what a grown history gives.

The survey this site cannot do

Four rounds of asking for a dataset, and it is still not here. What the work here can do instead is specify it — the fields, the sampling, the sizes, and which of this collection's claims each one would settle. Two of the four fields asked for turn out to be worth less than the asking implied, and one was never asked for at all.

wrong · Survey spec Two readings of what a stem is, and one of them is wrong. The same runs read twice. On the left is the pair counted from the point positions by machinery that is never shown a divergence angle; on the right is the pair read from the divergence sequence, which is the column the depth thread has been quoting. Every exponent's stems are counted at 5/8 spirals from the points. Read from the angles, the deepest rule's stems come back as something else at every seed, and a pair with a 8 replaced in it is not a near miss but a family whose step is several times as long. The settled divergence moves by 0.118 degrees across all five exponents, so the rules are on one lattice and the disagreement is a defect in one of the two instruments.

The pair read from the angles

Checking that a jostled stem is still the lattice its panel is about turned up a disagreement. Counted from the point positions every rule's stems return five and eight spirals; read from the divergence sequence, the deepest rule's stems come back as five and seven at every seed. The points are right, and this site's founding rule is why.

lattices · Counting All 19 destinations, counted at 17 windows from 20 to 800 organs. One row per destination, one cell per counting window, coarsest on the left. A dark cell is a window returning the same pair as the standing 200; a warm cell is a window returning a different one; a pale cell is a window that reaches below the run's own settling organ and was dropped. 5 of the 19 rows differ anywhere, and every difference sits left of the floor its own pair sets — 20 organs for a pair under 14 parastichies and the larger count plus 6 above it. The census read at 25 organs and at 800 is the same census.

The window nobody varied

Every parastichy pair reported for the settling table was counted over the top two hundred organs of a run, and that number had never been moved. Moved seventeen ways across a factor of forty, on all three hundred and eighty-four settled runs, it changes nothing at all.

lattices · Read window The disturbance with the largest wander leaves none in the sequence. How much of a divergence sequence's variance survives being averaged over blocks, on kinematic lattices. The vertical quantity is B² times the variance of the block means divided by the variance of the sequence, which is one at every block size for independent errors — the arithmetic is normalised for a differenced stream, since a divergence is the difference of two organs' errors. A line that climbs is a sequence with power at frequencies below one per block. The disturbances that remember the last error climb to 32 at a block of 128. The ones inherited between touching organs do not climb at all — 1.06 and 0.83 at the same block — although their own deviates carry ×5 and ×49 an independent stream's variance in exactly this statistic. What they do instead is dig a hole: at block sizes of 8 and 13, which are the offsets they couple at, the statistic falls to 0.22 and 0.21.

The second statistic was the first

The experiment this collection has been specifying was priced as two readings off one sequence, the second of them free. The two readings turn out to be one function looked at twice, so the specification loses a statistic — and gains a cheaper one, a warning about how observables get priced, and a question it could not previously ask.

wrong · Survey spec Every destination in the settling table, counted. One row per destination, placed across at the divergence the stems settled on and labelled with the parastichy pair a counter returns at the top of the run. 117 settled runs land on 15 destinations when two values within half a degree are called one. five of them sit on the golden or the Lucas sequence and ten do not, and the ones that do not are reached at every falloff exponent including the shallowest. Nothing here refuses to count: the settling test does not admit arrangements this collection would decline to call lattices.

A counter on the settling table

The settling table has reported an angle for every run that reaches a lattice, and nobody has ever counted one. A hundred and seventeen settled runs, regrown and counted: every one of them has a parastichy pair, and sixty-five of them land on sequences the ladder does not carry.

emergence · Settling What the 3 steep-only destinations count as. Each block is a divergence that only the two steeper falloff exponents settle a stem on, with the pair a counter returns and the sequence that pair belongs to. All three count. None is a rung of either ladder. Two of them are the only members of their sequence anywhere in the table; the third, at 148.1 degrees, is the coarsest rung of a sequence that supplies another destination at every exponent — so it is not a new kind of arrangement but a coarser one of a kind the table already reached.

What a steep rule counts as

Exponents four and five settle stems on 42.3°, 47.9° and 148.1°, and the two shallower ones reach none of them. All three count: 8/9, 8/15 and 2/5. None is a rung of either ladder, and one of them is the coarsest rung of a sequence the table already had.

emergence · Settling

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Claim testingDivergence angleHonest limitsParastichy pairFibonacciMeasurementNegative resultCensusExponentLadderSample sizeSurvey

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