Eddie Wu

They are not

arranged randomly, Mike.

They are arranged in a beautiful geometric pattern that actually relates to something called the golden ratio.

And it's a number, it's about 1.618 roughly, that's been used in architecture.

Some people have found it in all kinds of places in nature.

And the seeds, the florets of a sunflower are all spaced out

in the golden ratio of an angle, what's called the golden angle.

And that's what gives it this very particular geometry that we all recognize.

It is wonderfully orderly in the way that it's arranged.

And it actually is a similar kind of pattern that many plants use to space out their leaves to make sure that one leaf doesn't shade another one.

And this becomes even more challenging when you've got three or four or five or 500 leaves.

And so this spacing out using the golden angle and the golden ratio is what number one, enables the plant to be efficient with its photosynthesis.

And number two, allows the sunflower to space out its seeds and florets in this beautiful and very predictable geometry.

So it's not as though the sunflower is thinking of doing this,

But evolution has shown that the sunflowers that did this were the most productive.

And that's why those are the ones that have survived and have gone through survival of the fittest and been the ones that we see today.

The mathematics of randomness is an amazingly broad field.

So probably the place that I would go to is the idea of if you are flipping a coin repeatedly, we know that there's equal likelihood that it's going to come up heads or come up tails.

And that equal likelihood means random.

That's the whole idea that one outcome is not more likely than the other.