Michael Langan | 2010 | 3 min.
2012 Official Selection
Adapted from the poem by Brian Christian (author, THE MOST HUMAN HUMAN), HELIOTROPES offers a glance at how certain patterns repeat themselves at different levels of nature, whether we know it or not. Sunflower seeds and petals are known to follow the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical formula that makes their structure maximally efficient–but they don’t “know” they’re doing this. Likewise, humans go to such lengths to mathematically optimize flight patterns to maximize profit for airlines, but perhaps we don’t realize that what we are doing, when one stands back and looks at that flight data statistically, is simply trying to stay in the light.