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Fibonacci Poems Flourish


PUBLISHED: April 14, 2006

One week ago Slashdot wrote about Fibonacci-based poetry, more as a joke than anything else. Reader Gregory K. noted that the month being both National Poetry Month and Math Awareness month, and proposed six-line, twenty-syllable poems with a pattern of 1/1/2/3/5/8. On his blog he wrote his first “Fib”:

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

Slashdotters produced dozens of Fibs, and the meme spread across the blogosphere within days. Today, the New York Times’ Motoko Rich writes about the new form of poetry, reporting that about 1,000 have been written now.

Given that internet trends have historically consisted of things like Hamster Dance, “All Your Base” and Mahir (“I Kiss You!!!!!”), poetry seems like a big step forward.

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