The McCall Initiative: Bonus Material
In Episode 6: Desperation, Zoey deciphers a message written in a code she developed to send notes to her father when she was younger. This code is based on the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical concept related to the golden ratio. Evidence of both of these can be seen in such natural phenomena as the branching of leaves on a stem, the scales of a pine cone, and the family tree of a honey bee. The golden ratio has influenced architecture, art, music, and even book design. While there are those who claim there's too much inaccurate hype surrounding the Fibonnaci sequence, there's no doubt that it's an interesting concept.
So what exactly is the Fibonacci sequence? It's a series of numbers in which each number is equal to the sum of the two that proceed it. For example, 0+ 1 =1, 1 + 1= 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5, and so on.
Here's a list of some of the Fibonnaci numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10,946. As you can see, they get big pretty quickly. By the time you get to the 26th one, you're at 196,418. As Zoey points out, this makes for a code that isn't particularly useful. Her attempt at a solution was to figure out which letters of the alphabet are most commonly used and assign the smaller numbers to those. Here's the code she came up with:
So what exactly is the Fibonacci sequence? It's a series of numbers in which each number is equal to the sum of the two that proceed it. For example, 0+ 1 =1, 1 + 1= 2, 1 + 2 = 3, 2 + 3 = 5, and so on.
Here's a list of some of the Fibonnaci numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584, 4181, 6765, 10,946. As you can see, they get big pretty quickly. By the time you get to the 26th one, you're at 196,418. As Zoey points out, this makes for a code that isn't particularly useful. Her attempt at a solution was to figure out which letters of the alphabet are most commonly used and assign the smaller numbers to those. Here's the code she came up with:
