by Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin

With colleges and universities currently either struggling with plans to re-open their campuses to new and returning students or else gearing up to deliver at least the first term of instruction remotely, it is clear we are living in a very different world than just a year ago. Indeed, different from any we have ever experienced. What with one thing and another, the period we are living in right now is particularly grim on several fronts.

On a whim, I decided to look back a decade to see what I was writing about in Devlin’s Angle in September 2010. While many of our students still had high school ahead of them back then, for most of my readers it likely does not sound too far back. 

I was (very pleasantly) surprised at what I found. Of course, the format of Devlin’s Angle was very different back then, with the MAA website having a major makeover in February 2018. And 2010 was long enough ago for a previous upgrade of the website to have left posts from that time stripped over the MAA’s organizational webpage wrapper. But it wasn’t the formatting that surprised me, rather the topic I had chosen.  

The title of the September 2010 post was A Fibonacci Photo Album. It was an unusually short post, being little more than an introduction to an online collection of photographs I had taken over the seven-year period when I had been working on my book The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution. (The book was published the following year, after which I wrote two further books about Fibonacci, both spin-offs from the research I carried out to write the first.)

Given all the stresses of life just now, I found it a welcome break to spend a few minutes looking through those images that illustrate a story that took place 800 years ago—a time very different to today, yet a story that as mathematicians, we can all relate to. Since the mathematics from that era is low stress to anyone studying math today, and the topic of Fibonacci never ceases to capture students’ (and people in general) attention, I thought it might be worthwhile diving back into the archive to give that resource another spin. For one thing, it provides a free online resource for schoolchildren working at home, so it’s natural for project work. Its value in that regard is that many online resources about Fibonacci are decidedly dubious (i.e., full of unsupported claims and downright falsehoods).  

You can find the September 2010 post here.  [NOTE: The “Quicktime Presentation” referred to in that post has since been replaced by a Web accessible Keynote presentation on iCloud. You don’t need Keynote or an Apple device to view it. Web distribution has moved on a lot in the past decade.]