Manchester Science Festival citizen science project carries on work of Alan Turing

The trippy swirling patterns seen in the heads of sunflowers may have finally given up their mathematical secret. Researchers and citizen scientists have analysed the golden coloured flowers as part of a project celebrating the work of Alan Turing, the code-cracking computer scientist and forefather of artificial intelligence. Led by the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester and the Manchester Science Festival, the project set out to finish the work which Turing started before his death in 1954. Researchers enlisted the help of gardeners and citizen scientists all over the UK and beyond to analyse sunflower heads, testing how closely they followed the Fibonacci rule. Long known to mathematicians and fans of the psychedelic, the Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers which, when plotted, predict the ratio of concentric swirls seen throughout nature – from intricate shells, to the petals and seed heads of some flowers, including sunflowers.