The Algebra of Knitting...

I got the new Knit Picks catalog a couple of days ago, and while I was perusing it, a sentence in one of the descriptions jumped out at me: "Knitters have been using this Fibonacci Sequence to create stripes for generations." My first thought was "really?" and my second thought was "what's the Fibonacci Sequence again?" However, thinking back to The Da Vinci Code, and after a quick web search, I was able to remember that in the Fibonacci Sequence, each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers. For example, 0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, so that the Fibonacci Sequence begins 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. The numbers get rapidly bigger after that, so my guess is that knitters aren't going too far up the sequence when knitting stripes. (For a more mathematical explanation, try this Wikipeida article.)

With a little more research, I learned that knitters do indeed use the Fibonacci sequence as a design element. Apparently, designing with Fibonacci numbers and other mathematical ideas results in patterns that are pleasing to the human eye. Fuzzy Galore offers an interesting article on ways to use Fibonacci numbers specifically. Planet Shoup adds Lucas numbers and the Golden Ratio to the mix in an article called "Math for Craft Design". I particularly liked her discussion about the width and length of afghans. I have often wondered how to determine what the ratio of width to length should be. I would never have thought of using Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio to figure it out.

Oddly, when I searched "Fibonacci Numbers" and crocheting, I didn't get any results. Everything I found, from Knit Picks to the websites linked to above, mentioned knitting specifically. So a crocheter looking for this information wouldn't necessarily find anything without doing a very broad search. Yet it seems to me that, at least in this case, what's good for the knitter is equally good for the crocheter. I think I will test this out, perhaps with the next preemie blanket I crochet.