Fibonacci Series Hidden on Pisa Church

In September 2015, Professor Pietro Armienti found, embedded in the façade of Saint Nicola’s Church in Pisa, a message that had been hidden for over 800 years. It is a code embedded in the geometrically perfect lunette of the church, which might sound familiar to the readers of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code”: the Fibonacci series.
Leonardo Fibonacci (around 1175-1235) was a mathematician from Pisa and his formula is represented by a series of images going from circles to squares over the marbles of the little church. It was Prof. Armienti who discovered, through his studies, that those geometrical shapes related specifically to the numbers of the Fibonacci sequence.
A report of his research has been published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage. The Fibonacci Series is a succession of numbers where each number corresponds to the sum of the two preceding numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21… This series seems to have its origins in the description of rubbits’ birth progression, but can also be used for describing other natural phenomena such as the growth of trees, seashells or the disposition of leaves. The same progression of numbers can be found in music and in great artworks.
What is amazing is to find that series also on the façade of a church in Pisa, Fibonacci’s home town. The message is a clear indication of how important Fibonacci’s Series was.

This post is also available in: Italian French Spanish German Portuguese (Portugal) Russian