>I don't see Chomsky espousing pseudo-mystical notions. He simply said it's found all over nature and it's not well understood why. By your insulting tone, I would surmise you have a grudge with Chomsky that goes well beyond anything to do with Fibonacci numbers.

Are you a neo-libertarian, perhaps?

Amusing, but no. I'm rather a fan of his political writings, and while he's extreme in his views, certain concepts like manufacturing consent appear to have validity. But, unlike his politics, I don't have a firm grasp of his linguistics, so in order to gauge his credibility, I'm looking toward a topic I know.

My grudge, if I have any at all, is not with Chomsky or his politics, but rather with the Myth of Magical Numbers, which has so entrenched itself that even mathematicians have fallen prey to it in one form or another for centuries, if not millennia. I'll point you back to Devlin[0][1] regarding the golden ratio claims.

I could go on, but you get the picture, I hope. I've done my bit once again, and attempted once more to right my own previous wrongs in inadvertently adding fuel to this curious forest-fire of myths.

Just as happened last time, I anticipate receiving some truly ANGRY emails from readers incensed that I should dare question their long cherished beliefs about this particular number. (Maybe that's why we say it is irrational?)

And there we scratch the surface of what I think is a fascinating aspect of human nature. People, at least many people, seem to really WANT there to be numbers with mystical properties. So much so that they are prepared to put aside their otherwise wise insistence on evidence or proof.

(Many of the emails I got last time demanded that I give proof that the golden ratio is not in the design of the Parthenon, for instance. Which is of course to get the scientific method completely backwards. The hypothesis in that case is that the GR did figure in the Greeks' design, and that is what needs justification - and does not get. Ditto all the other spurious GR claims.)

[0] See last post, Devlin 2007.

[1] Dr. Keith Devlin is a co-founder and Executive Director of the Stanford University's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. At the time of writing, he served as Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and appeared as The Math Guy on NPR's Weekend Edition. http://web.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/ if you care for his credentials.