September 12, 2010
A University's Multiplication Problem
Lyle Stafford for The Chronicle
Victoria, British Columbia
You don't need to know Fibonacci's rabbit formula (fn = fn1 + fn2) to realize that the University of Victoria has a serious problem.
Fibonacci was the 13th-century mathematician who posed the question: If you start with two rabbits, which reproduce each month, and their offspring also reproduce each month, at the end of one year, how many rabbits would you have?
"A lot," sighs Tom Smith, the university's executive director of facilities management. And that is exactly how many