The only thing better than getting mail art is getting Fibonnacci mail art.
Well, I’ll allow that quantum mail art of some variety would be wicked cool too: imagine the possiblities for up, down, charm, and strange quark postcards. Or a Heisenberg card: you’d never know for certain both when it had been sent and when it arrived. But you could know one of those things.
Sorry, I’ll stop with the geek jokes now. I was talking about my birthday.
Because I had one last fall, and a month or so later my dear artist/author/sometime-zombie friend sent me this postcard with a Fibonacci series on it. She cuts this stuff out of extra copies of one of the books she’s published and then glues, sews, draws, and sends off dozens of these art-o-licious cards to people around the world, who also send her mail art back. She puts it all on her mail art blog and if you love getting mail art you should leave a comment over there and ask because she sends it to anyone, free! Amazing, in this day and age.
But my birthday. Mary Jo knows I love to extend the party as long as possible, so she helps me with that by reminding me to keep on celebrating. My birthday cards can NEVER be late. It just isn’t possible. I’d go the whole year if I could do it and not be disowned by my family.
And linking my birthday with art, extension of partytime, and Fibonnacci? Well, that’s quite a dramatic statement. A Fibonacci sequence falls into the following pattern:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…
Each number is the sum of the previous two. Sounds simple, right? It is simple, but it is also astonishing. This beautiful spiraling series is all over the place: in sunflower heads, pine cones, avacados, pineapples, honeybees, nautilus shells, and ferns. Many flowering, curling, swooping things are designed and unfold in a Fibonacci series.
I might just spiral through my celebrations in an endless swoon of mathematical artistry.
You never thought about it quite that way, did you?
By the way, I just got her Christmas (New Year’s, Martin Luther King Jr., Valentine’s Day) card in the mail. I have the coolest friends imaginable.
{ 3 comments }
