The Mysterious Connection between Honey Bees and Mathematics | Mathematics - Medium

““…that vast book which stands forever opened before our eyes, I mean the universe, … cannot be read until we have learned the language… It is written in mathematical language, … without which… it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.” — Galileo, the Father of Modern Science

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Everyone knows about honey bees. However, the bees have known what human mathematicians didn’t know for thousands of years by Ali Kayaspor, Math Teacher -  Mathematics - Medium.

The Mysterious Connection between Honey Bees and Mathematics
Photo: Medium

A honeybee may be the coolest creator in the universe. Its body is beautifully patterned, can fly wherever it wants, spends its time near beautiful flowers, produces the most delicious and incredible substance in nature, honey, and, most importantly, it is a great mathematician.The amount of knowledge they have of the world around them is comparable to graduating from the best schools of science and engineering. They show us that mathematics is the language of nature and science. Aristotle was one of the first to document the intriguing behavior of honey bees. For centuries afterwards, mathematicians have been become fascinated with bees.

I can announce with certainty that if Jon Snow was the King in the North, honey bees are kings in the insect kingdom. They have proven to be surprisingly intelligent compared to other creatures in the animal kingdom.

There is a famous misquote:

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.”

Humans could not understand the perfection of honey bees which were made by the Creator until the discovery of mathematics. But what makes honey bees nature’s greatest mathematicians? So far, we have 5 reasons to believe so:

• They have the ability to produce a geometrically impressive waxy comb.
• The reason why they prefer hexagons over other shapes
• They can easily solve the “Travelling Salesman Problem”
• They can grasp the idea of zero.
• They can solve simple and basic mathematical questions.

A two week old honeybee basically becomes a wax printer. It can convert sugar from the honey into a waxy substance. At this point, an utterly impressive thing happens; a honeybee and its friends make arguably one of the most mathematically and architecturally efficient designs around a beehive, despite the fact that they have never studied theories of tessellations or engineering. But why does design matter to a bee? It is because of the material, wax...

So those are the reasons why mathematicians think bees make one of nature’s greatest mathematicians. Mathematics is the universal language and when you look at a perfect honeycomb you see a shadow of that language. Mathematics made real by bees and I certainly believe that all the instilled knowledge in honey bees is coming from the divine force. We can discover more of the order the Creator has built into the universe. Only thus can we read further in the great book of nature which lies open before us.

I wish honey bees were my math teacher or my friends so they could do my homework.
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Source: medium.com