fibs in mathematics

Ben macintyre "The Times May24 2008"

It is much easier to tell a fib than to write one.

A fib is a new sort of poetry, born of the internet, and the latest evidence of the way that the language is evolving in cyberspace in the oddest ways. The fib is a six-line, 20-syllable poem in which the number of syllables in each line is the sum of the syllables in the two preceding lines. This corresponds to the Fibonacci sequence, one of the most elegant patterns in mathematics, in which each successive number is the sum of the two previous numbers. 1,1,2,3,5,8.]

Here is a fib written by Gregory K. Pincus, a screenwriter, part-time librarian and aspiring children's author, which he posted on his blog in 2006.

One Small, Precise, Poetic, Spiralling mixture: Maths plus poetry yields the Fib.

(Theoretically a fib could be continued infinitely, but that would be impractical: the 20th line of a fib would have to contain 6,765 syllables). Composing fibs is an enjoyable parlour game, a way to force words into a pattern, but at their best fibs can be rather beautiful, a cross between a haiku and an equation, at once free and regulated. The Fibonacci sequence was introduced to Western mathematics in 1202 by Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. Pincus was not the first to adapt the sequence to arL Bela Bartok used Fibonacci numbers in his music, and the sequence makes an appearance (written in invisible ink on the floor of the Louvre) in Dan Brown's t-' ne Da Vinci Code. It even appears in nature: the nautilus, a tropical marine creature, has a multichambered spiral shell that follows the curve of the Fibonacci sequence as it grows.

But Pincus was the first to give the fib a name, a place in cyberspace, and thus a platform that has spawned an entirely new wave of poetry. Within weeks of Pincus's first picked up the idea, and thousands of fibs began appearing all over the web, on hundreds of websites. Within two months of inventing the fib, Mr Pincus had secured a two-book pub- lishing deal, and a cult following. "What's striking about this story," writes Mark Abley in 'The Prodigal Tongue', his fascinating account of developing English, "is not just the quality of responses, nor even their quantity, so much as the speed at which a new literary form burgeoned across cyberspace." And like everything else on the internet, mathematical poetry has acquired a life of its own.

First cousin to the fib is the cadae, which relies on the concept of pi, or p, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, (The word itself corresponds, alphabetically, to the first five digits of p, 3.14159. C=3, A=I, D=4 etc.). Where fibs number syllables, the cadae is an arrangement of words with letter-counts corresponding to the sequence of p: three in the first word, one in the next, and so on.

Michael Keith has written an entire "Cadaeic cadenza"called Near a Raven, a tribute to The Raven (1844). Not so much Edgar Allan Poe as Edgar Allan Pi, it begins:

"Poe. E (3.1)

Near a Raven (415) Midnights so dreary, tired and weary."

(926535)

"Silently pondering volumes as extolling all by-now obsolete lore." (897932384)

This continues for 18 verses, taking the process to 660 decimal places. It is mathematically perfect, poetically baffling, and almost exquisitely pointless.

Perhaps of more use is the mnemonic sentence composed by Sir James Jeans, an English astrophysicist, to enable students to remember pi to 24 digits by the letters in each word: "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics." (i.e. 314159265358979)

Some have hailed the fib as the ultimate form of geek poetry, a creative process in which number-crunching combines with word-crunching for people with too much time on their hands. No one could predict that the sonnet would take off as it did after it was introduced into English in the early 16th century. Fibs may just be the sonnets of the internet age. So here goes:

"I -Think- Fibbing -Can't be bad -Until, of course, the -Process drives us all barking mad."