This book uses the spiral shape as a key to a multitude of strange and seemingly disparate stories about art, nature, science, mathematics, and the human endeavour. In a way, the book is itself organized as a spiral, with almost disconnected chapters circling around and closing in on the common theme. A particular strength of the book is its extremely cross-disciplinary nature - everything is fun, and everything is connected! At the same time, the author puts great emphasis on mathematical and scientific correctness, in contrast, perhaps, with some earlier books on spirals. Subjects include the mathematical properties of spirals, sea shells, sun flowers, Greek architecture, air ships, the history of mathematics, spiral galaxies, the anatomy of the human hand, the art of prehistoric Europe, Alfred Hitchcock, and spider webs, to name a few.

The object of this book is to explain how to create a synthesis of complex biostratigraphic data, and how to extract from such a synthesis a relative time scale based exclusively on the fossil content of sedimentary rocks. Such a time scale can be used to attribute relative ages to isolated fossil-bearing samples. The book is composed of 10 chapters together with several appendices. It is a totally revised version of "Biochronological Correlations" published in 1991 and includes various new chapters. The book offers a solution for the theoretical problem of how fossils can be used to make reliable quantitative stratigraphic correlations in sedimentary geology. It also describes the use of highly efficient software along with several examples. The authors compare their theoretical model with 2 other relevant studies: probabilistic stratigraphy and constrained optimization (CONOP).

This book uses the spiral shape as a key to a multitude of strange and seemingly disparate stories about art, nature, science, mathematics, and the human endeavour. In a way, the book is itself organized as a spiral, with almost disconnected chapters circling around and closing in on the common theme. A particular strength of the book is its extremely cross-disciplinary nature - everything is fun, and everything is connected! At the same time, the author puts great emphasis on mathematical and scientific correctness, in contrast, perhaps, with some earlier books on spirals. Subjects include the mathematical properties of spirals, sea shells, sun flowers, Greek architecture, air ships, the history of mathematics, spiral galaxies, the anatomy of the human hand, the art of prehistoric Europe, Alfred Hitchcock, and spider webs, to name a few.