Fibonacci Numbers

I first came across Fibonacci numbers when I was a computer programmer at Honeywell. The series is structured such that the first two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence are 0 and 1, and each subsequent number is the sum of the previous two, i.e., 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21....... Both the name and the sequence were different from those I had learned. But not only were they different, there were business advantages in using them. The sequence was used to construct a sorting program which was the fastest of its time.

You don't see the term very often, so I was struck by an article in the Wall Street Journal which mentioned the Fibonacci number sequence. The article was about Aidan Dwyer, a 13-year old who had won a national science competition by developing solar panels arrayed like the leaves on a tree and thus collected sunlight more efficiently than traditional setups. Or, so he - and the judges of the competition -  assumed. They were both wrong as Aidan had measured the wrong thing, voltage rather than power.

We live in a funny age. Who would have believed that the fact that a 13-year-old made a mistake which was not seen quick enough by judges of scientific competitions for kids could have caused a major commotion on the internet. Many people expressed hate towards Aidan. How people could get so worked up is beyond me.

From the article Aidan sounds like the kind of kid who will help reverse our decline. He knows he made a mistake, but he thinks the idea still has merit and is spending some time proving its worth. He's spending time between speaking engagements as he has been invited to speak before some fairly prestigious scientific gatherings including the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.