A Burden of Wonder

I was recently preparing for a lecture on recursion for a first year programming course. The examples include computing the first n Fibonacci numbers, generating the permutations of a string and testing whether a string is a palindrome. For some reason I was inspired to find out a little bit more about the Fibonacci numbers in order to provide the class with a few interesting – for me, at least – historical and mathematical trivia. I was astonished to find a magnificently huge amount of material on the matter. The work presented here is clearly not my own. It does however provide a sense of the marvellously magical world in which we live. Since the theme of this volume is “From Operations Research to Software Engineering and Beyond”, I had hoped to find a thread starting at statistics, through some interesting numbers, and ending at computer science. Specifically had I hoped to start this piece with the Wishart distribution1. I was, alas, not able to find a suitable link between this distribution and the rest of the topics in the paper. In true academic style, finding this link is left as future work.