Fibonacci, no accident

To: Retort
From: IB

This week's (November 29) fascinating four-way discussion on the BBC Radio 4 series "In Our Time" about the history and mystery of the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13...) - primed, no doubt, by the Da Vinci Code - was crying out for the voice of a materialist historian of mathematics at the table.  But where are the epigones of Dirk Struik, Edgar Zilsel or Alfred Sohn-Rethel?  All honor to the immense labours of Les Levidow, but what happened to the radical science movement? Why is the name Luke Hodgkin not in Melvyn Baargh's phone book?  Luke gave an answer four decades ago: "The idea that the history of mathematics should include social determinants is seen as absurd even by Marxists". Still, Richard Levins would have had five or eight things to say on the topics under discussion: the role of Fibonacci in the supersession of the clunky Roman sign-value system by Hindu-Arabic place value notation, late capitalist packing theory, the Fibonacci series vis-a-vis the growth of plants, the golden ratio in art history.  Predictably,  the conversation gets suspended between Pythagorean idealism (or Bragg's aestheticized instinctual version of it) and a 'peas-in-the-pod' calculus of efficiency projected onto a vulgar nature.  And no mention of the remarkable biological work on Fibonacci and morphogenesis by Alan Turing, cut short when he was hounded to suicide by a homophobic British state apparatus, which offered him prison or an oestrogen implant in his thigh. 

To hear the programme, go to: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml>