THE TREE - DA VINCI CODE

Does a 500-year-old sketch explain how all trees grow?

-  NICK D'ALTO

The Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) painted beautiful trees in the backgrounds of some of his masterpiece paintings. He was also a visionary scientist. And on a single page of his extraordinary notebooks, this all-around genius hit on a remarkable theory about trees. He wrote and illustrated a simple mathematical formula that might explain how all trees grow.

Five hundred years later, modernday experts have finally put da Vinci's formula to the test. They have subjected it to our 21st-century science. So, does the da Vinci code for trees still stand up?

Look at a Tree

Beginning from its trunk, a tree's branches grow smaller as the tree rises. The tree branches into more, smaller stems the higher it goes. That's not a secret. But da Vinci, who enjoyed tackling scientific problems, wanted to know more. He sought to understand precisely how much thinner its branches became.

Here was his amazing insight:
"At any height on the tree, the area of all the branches always adds up to the area of the trunk."

Examining Da Big Idea