Arabic + Statistician = Fibonacci Numbers

I have a statistician in my small Arabic class here in Beirut. There are 3 of us in the class - a female lawyer, a male statistician and myself. This guy is a serious mathematician and knows his stuff.

The other day in class, while we were learning the alphabet, he explained that the Arabic letter 'alef' or A is used in mathematics. He went on to say that there was a connection between the Arabic letter 'Alef', the Hebrew letter 'Aleph' and with the mathematical set theory. This is where the Hebrew 'Aleph' letter is used to represent the cardinality of infinite sets. I wasn’t able to follow him and got lost after a few sentences. After class my head was spinning!

That night I woke up in the middle of the night saying the words 'Fibonacci numbers'. I had no idea what those words meant. It seems that the discussion in class about Alif, Aleph, the mathematical set theory and the cardinality of infinite sets triggered my memory of the term Fibonacci numbers. I had no idea where I had heard the term before. Perhaps from the 1998 movie, Pi, which I saw around 10 years ago.

Later in the day I looked up the term 'Fibonacci number' on the Internet.

Apparently Fibonacci numbers appear in nature, such as in the leaves of a stem and in the arrangement of a pine cone and also in pop culture (Da Vinci Code, music, architecture, etc).

The first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each remaining number is the sum of the previous two. It is a mathematical sequence that was well known in India and is related to Sanskrit prosody.

That night, Fibonacci numbers also appeared in my dream.