Liberal Arts Blog — Dogwood (Four Petals), Crabapple (Five), Wild Roses (Five), Iris (Three “Standards,” Three “Falls”)
Liberal Arts Blog — Monday is the Joy of Math, Statistics, Shapes, and Numbers Day
Today’s Topic: Dogwood (four petals), Crabapple (five), Wild roses (five), Iris (three “standards,” three “falls”)
Roses can have hundreds of petals, but the wild rose has five. The iris has either six or three depending on whether you make the technical distinction between petals (the upright central ones, called “standards” and the drooping outer ones called falls.” Wild cherry trees typically have five petals but many cultivars have many more. In Japan a cherry with more than five petals is called a Yaezakura and typically blossoms two to four weeks after the five-petaled kind. Tulips, like irises, typically have three inner “petals” and three outer “sepals” but the tulip sepals don’t droop.
Have you ever explored the arithmetic of flowers? Please share your observations and musings.
This morning, a mini- refresher course with a climactic finish.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
CALYX (sepals) + COROLLA (petals) = PERIANTH = the sterile, conspicuous part of the flower for attracting specific pollinators
1. “Like petals, sepals are modified leaves, but they are often green and somewhat rugged; they serve to protect and enclose the flower bud.”
2. “Petals, by contrast, are often thinner and more delicate than sepals and come in a myriad of colors.”
3. “In some flowers, such as many lilies and orchids, the petals and sepals are indistinguishable in appearance; such undifferentiated structures are known as tepals.”
TYPICALLY ONE PISTIL (female), MANY STAMENS (male) — but there are exceptions
1. Pistils have four parts: stigma, style, ovary, and ovule.
2. Stamens have two: anther (where the pollen is produced) and filament.
3. The female parts of a flower are sometimes called the gynoesium (female parts of a Roman house) and the male parts the androecium.
NB Daisies, dandelions, and buttercups have more than one pistil. Lilies have just one.
THE BIG PICTURE — roots, shoots (stems), leaves — the basketball player analogy
1. The basketball player has lots of team spirit (roots). Does his job (shoots). But is eager to get home (leaves).
2. H20 from the ground (roots).
3. 6H2O + 6CO2 + sunlight/chlorphyll = C6H12O6 + 6O2 = Hallelujah!
NB: Top that for a miracle…..”The divergence of plants and animals has been estimated from sequence data to be around 1.6 billion years ago, and the earliest known fossils of multicellular plants and animals date to around 570 million years ago.”
Have you thanked magnesium and nitrogen lately? Chlorophyll’s chemical formula: C55H70O6N4MG !!!!!!!
Galileo was right about nature — it’s a book written in the language of mathematics!
Petal | Definition, Flower, Structure, & Facts
Dogwood | Description, Tree, Flowers, Major Species, & Facts
Evolution of plants — Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://ohioplants.org/flowers-pistils/
QUOTE OF THE MONTH — Have you made your own Bible yet?
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
Last four years of posts organized thematically:
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to math, statistics, or numbers in general.
Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to math.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. And to consolidate in your memory something you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
