Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’ve been rather busy as of late, not to mention I’ve switched hosts for this, and another, larger site twice within a few days. ANYWAY, I thought I would make a fun and quick post about something rather random (as that is in my nature!). After racking my brain for a few seconds, I thought “Hmm, Phi is pretty cool, why not post about it?”. So here it is, the product of on the spot randomness

The Golden Ratio is also called the Divine Proportion, the Golden Mean or is expressed as φ “Phi” (a Greek letter). Mathematically, it can be expressed as (1 + √5) ÷ 2 or approximately 1.6180339887. Basically two numbers are in the golden ratio if the ratio between the sum of the numbers and the larger number is the same as the ratio between the larger number and the smaller number.

At this point, you may be wondering, what exactly is the big deal about this number? So you get 1.618 when you divide some numbers, why do I care? Well, the interesting thing about the golden ratio is that MANY things in nature fall into this ratio and for some reason it is very aesthetically pleasing to people and probably animals as well.

Even your very own body contains elements relating to the golden ratio. For instance you can measure the length of your lower arm (elbow to fingertip) and divide this by the length of your forearm (wrist to elbow) and you should get a result very near 1.618. Want to test more tricks on yourself? - Since I know you just tried that one out Check out this page.

The Divine Proportion relates directly to something called the Fibonacci Sequence and is often taught in various math classes as strictly “golden rectangles” which are very interesting in and of themselves (basically rectangles that fall into the golden ratio and are found in thousands of places throughout art and such)

Millions of instances of φ occur in the universe and overall it is a very interesting concept. I’ve just briefly touched on it here, and I have spent a good deal of time researching it in the past. If you are interested in this topic, you can continue your research very easily. A good place to start is the Golden Ratio Wikipedia Page.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.