Phyllotaxis: the mathematical description and modelling of leaf patterns (Q969628)

The authors give an overview of the mathematical modeling of plant leaf placement. They also give a clear presentation of continued fractions and Ford circles in the hyperbolic plane, in order to apply these to clarify the meaning of a particular parametrization used in the study of phyllotaxis. The paper ends with the presentation of a possible model for explaining observations of the Fibonacci sequence in the setting of phyllotaxis.