Nearest neighbour — where it appears
Counting the spirals
Almost every claim about phyllotaxis is a claim about how many spirals run through a pattern, and the count is almost never done. It can be done from the points alone, by machinery that is never told what angle built them — and then a count of 34 is evidence rather than a restatement.
Packing, measured four ways
The claim is that the golden angle packs best. It is measurable, and the measurement gives three different winners on three criteria — all near 137.5° and none of them it. That does not make the claim wrong; it makes the usual statement of it wrong.
Counting without an index
A person counting spirals on a cone puts a finger on one scale, follows a family round, and counts how many distinct chains there are. That needs no order of arrival — and building it turns out to be strictly more general than the counter the site had, and to find a bug in the counting of a bijugate stem that no assertion would have caught.
The exponent that barely matters
A code comment on this site claimed since its foundation phase that the repulsion's falloff exponent hardly changes the answer. It could not be tested, because the function that would have taken it never passed one down. Tested at last, it is true on a disc — by three and a half degrees across a sixteenfold range — and on a stem it decides whether there is a pattern at all.
Named alongside it
The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.
RiseCylinderDivergence angleBranchNoiseParastichyAsymptotic claimCounting blindChain countingCriterion dependenceDiscriminationEnsemble