Patterns, Fibonacci and Our Awesome Universe

While watching an episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, "Night Call" (Episode 139 -- February 7, 1964) there is a scene where the old woman has been assisted into a wheelchair. The camera angle is from the viewpoint of an adult looking down to the woman. Across her lap is a knit afghan with a zigzag pattern similar to the kind my grandmother used to make, and for just a moment the camera lingers on the pattern.

One of the thoughts I had in that moment: what would an afghan look like if instead of being knit into a pattern, the colors and knitting were totally random? Isn't it the pattern or design that gives the afghan its interest?

In 2008 I wrote about color as a facet of making or appreciating art. Design and pattern could be added to the list of things which can make a drawing or painting interesting.

Nature is full of patterns, from atomic structure to the design of galaxies... from the incredible Fibonacci sequence to the rhythm of waves... from the phenomenon of day and night to the miracle of a heartbeat...

In the Renaissance, artists did not see beauty as accidental. They believed it could be discovered, studied, and deliberately constructed. Pattern—whether in proportion, repetition, or geometry—was one of their primary tools for doing so.

Figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Leon Battista Alberti were not only artists but thinkers who sought underlying order in the world. They were deeply influenced by classical ideas of harmony, especially the belief that mathematics revealed the structure of reality. This conviction shaped both painting and architecture.

One of the most intriguing patterns associated with Renaissance art is the Fibonacci sequence and its related “Golden Ratio.” While not always applied consciously in a strict numerical sense, its proportions—roughly 1:1.618—appear repeatedly in compositions. Painters arranged figures, horizons, and focal points along these invisible lines, creating balance that feels natural rather than forced. The eye is gently guided, not commanded.

In architecture, this pursuit of proportion becomes even more explicit. Alberti and others designed buildings where height, width, and spatial divisions followed harmonious ratios. The result is not merely structural integrity but a sense of calm coherence—spaces that feel “right” even if the observer cannot explain why.

What makes this especially compelling is that these patterns mirror those found in nature: the spiral of a shell, the arrangement of leaves, the unfolding of galaxies. Renaissance artists believed they were not imposing order but participating in it—echoing a design already embedded in creation.

In this sense, pattern is not decoration. It is revelation. It is the quiet framework beneath the visible surface, the hidden scaffolding that gives a work of art its unity and power. And once you begin to see it, it is hard to unsee—the world itself starts to look like a carefully composed canvas.

Elton Trueblood once suggested that if the world is the product of an Infinite Mind, its beauty should not surprise us. That idea becomes more than philosophical speculation when you begin to trace patterns—not just in art or music, but in mathematics itself.

Educator/mathematician James Nickel describes how for him this realization did not come through formal schooling, but almost by accident. While preparing to teach high school mathematics in the early 1980s, he began exploring resources that connected numbers to the real world—books on geometry in art, the growth patterns of nature, and the Fibonacci sequence. What struck him was not merely the elegance of the numbers, but their recurrence—in shells, architecture, spirals, and proportions that seemed to echo across creation.

What had been presented in school as isolated facts suddenly revealed itself as something cohesive, even luminous. Fibonacci—Leonardo of Pisa—was no longer just a historical figure attached to a number sequence, but a doorway into what Nickel called “an opulent beauty,” a harmony linking human creativity with the structure of the natural world, and ultimately pointing the Creator God of All, all nature declaring His glory.

Equally striking was what had been missed. Traditional math education, with its emphasis on deduction and abstraction, often stripped away this sense of wonder. Geometry became a system of proofs rather than a language describing reality. The “pattern” was still there, but the meaning had been muted.

And so the rediscovery of pattern becomes, in a sense, a recovery of vision—learning again to see what was always present.

Check out this interview with author/mathematician James Nickel on The Wonders of the Fibonacci Sequence.