![]() He changes months intoyears and rabbits into bulls (male) and cows (females) in problem 175 in his book 536 puzzles and Curious Problems (1967, Souvenir press): If a cow produces its first she-calf at age two years and after that produces another single she-calf every year, how many she-calves are there after 12 years, assuming none die? This is a better simplification of the problem and quite realistic now.īut Fibonacci does what mathematicians often do at first,simplify the problem and see what happens - and the series bearinghis name does have lots of other interesting and practicalapplications as we see later. In one of them he adapts Fibonacci'sRabbits to cows, making the problem more realistic in the way we observed above.He gets round the problems by noticing that really, it is only the females that are interesting - er - I mean the number of females! We can get round this by saying thatthe female of each pair mates with any male and produces anotherpair.Īnother problem which again is not true to life, is that each birth is ofexactly two rabbits, one male and one female.ĭudeney's CowsThe English puzzlist, Henry E Dudeney (1857 - 1930, pronounced Dude-knee)wrote several excellent books of puzzles (see after this section). It seems to imply that brother and sisters mate, which,genetically, leads to problems. The Rabbits problem is not very realistic, is it? There are many other interesting mathematical properties of this tree that are explored in later pagesat this site.Ġ, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987. There are a Fibonacci number of rabbits in total from the top down to any single generation. ![]() ![]() There are a Fibonacci number of new rabbits in each generation, marked with a dot. ![]()
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