Key points Patterns help students solve new problems, so use them in education. Analogies are strong tools for teaching patterns. For example, subtraction from a smaller number is like walking ...

Nature follows a number pattern called Fibonacci This undated photo shows a spruce cone with a marked fibonacci number sequence.

Yet in an uncanny number of real-world data sets, an astonishing 30.1 percent of the entries begin with a 1, 17.6 percent begin with a 2, and so on. This phenomenon is known as Benford's law.