The Golden Ratio — Introduction
“The senses delight in things duly proportioned” - Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
What do seemingly unconnected natural phenomena such as the arrangments of seeds in the head of a sunflower, the elegant spiral of a snail shell and the shape of the Milky Way galaxy have in common? What universal geometric principle is hidden in the works of the great artists and architects, from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, Leonardo Da Vinci and Salvador Dali? Incredible as it may seem, the answer to these two questions is simply a number: a value that has been known for centuries which continually appears in all kinds of natural and artistic manifestations. As a result, this number has earned such names as the ‘divine ratio’, ‘golden ratio’ or ‘golden number’. To reproduce the number in print is literally impossible, not because it is excessively large — it is barely larger than 1 — but because it is composed of an infinite string of digits that never conforms to a repeating pattern. And so, we must turn to mathematical notations to represent the golden ratio and make it more manageable:
