Hadn’t the Greeks come up with the ellipse from doing solid geometry, from slicing up imaginary cones, and then centuries later, the ellipse turned out to describe the exact shape of planetary orbits? Hadn’t ancient people invented trigonometry, centuries before anyone knew that sound waves were shaped like sine waves? Fibonacci came up with the Fibonacci sequence just from adding up numbers, and then its ratio turned out to be encoded in the seed spirals on a sunflower.
