Abstract

Taking a walk around our neighborhood or in the park on a sunny day, if we look around, we will see lots of flowers and plants. So, we may wonder: “How is it that plants can maximize their photosynthesis?” In other words, “How can the leaves be best laid out to obtain the most amount of sunlight?”. Intuitively, the plant with the leaves that are spread out most evenly would be the most efficient. Based on observations and research, different plants have their own constant leaf spacing angle. Utilizing MIT Scratch and Python, the author has programmed a “Leaf Calculator” to output standard deviation of leaf spacing given inputs of leaf rotation angle and leaf count. Iterations from rotation angle zero (0) to 180 degrees and leaf count one (1) to 30 were completed to produce a Tournament scoreboard, followed by a “Find Winner” program to discover the winner with the lowest cumulative standard deviation. The winner is the plant in which the leaf rotation angle grows such that the pattern is the most evenly spread out. A “Grow” program was also written to visualize the leaf growth at any angle and count. In the future, plants may be genetically engineered for maximum photosynthesis. Surprisingly, this work is related to the Golden Ratio.