jmadigan.net

« Happy 9^th Anniversary, Geralyn! |Main| Dress Your Family in Courduroy and Denim »

The Golden Ratio June 2, 2006

The full title of this book is The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, The World’s Most Astonishing Number. Now, I know you may not believe me when I say this, but despite this being a BOOK about a NUMBER, it's really not as exciting as you might expect.

Still, I enjoy stepping outside my own areas of expertise or experience and looking into new areas like mathematics. I think the problem is that I’ve been spoiled by stuff like Bill Bryson’s excellent A Brief History of Nearly Everything, which manages to take material that should by all rights be boring and make it engaging by focusing on the quirky personalities and the bigger picture of how it relates to our everyday lives now. Unfortunately that wasn’t really the case with The Golden ratio.

Briefly, a golden ratio (a.k.a., "the divine ratio" or "the mean and extreme ratio") is achieved when a line is divided into two segments such that the ratio of the smaller segment to the larger is the same as the ratio of the larger segment to the entire line. Here, here’s a picture I ganked from Wikipedia’s entry on the topic:

If you assume a unit length (like "1 foot" for one of the line segments) and do some math, you end up with the irrational number "Phi," which approximates to 1.61803… Phi is like the underappreciated cousin of another irrational number, Pi, which you may remember from basic geometry as 3.14159…yadayadayada. Irrational numbers like Phi and Pi have the quality that they can’t be expressed neatly and exactly as the ratio of two whole numbers. You can calculate them out to an infinite number of decimal places and they’ll never end or repeat.

So with that little math lesson out of the way, this book goes into how ancient philosophers, mathematicians, artists, musicians, architects, and even Mother Nature made use of Phi to make aesthetically pleasing or interesting stuff. Or that they didn’t. One of the author’s more annoying habits is to spend a whole chapter conjecturing about how, say, the ancient Egyptians used Phi to design the Great Pyramids of Giza, only to reveal in the last paragraph that no, they didn’t after all. Psych!

Still, Phi does really show up in some interesting places, like the shapes of spiral galaxies or nautilus shells or mathematical oddities like Fibonacci numbers. It’s an intoxicatingly cool idea to think that Phi is a kind of building block that ties the universe together in some mysterious way if we could only fully comprehend it. Like if you calculated it out to enough decimal places, you’d find a hidden message like this from the Almighty Maker himself :

But some interesting anecdotes and mathematical gymnastics aside, the author rarely succeeds in making things that interesting for any period of time. Fascinating as the underlying ideas are, this seems like a topic that could be covered sufficiently in a magazine article, journal monograph, or encyclopedia entry more appropriately than a whole book.

Comments (1) | Permalink | File under: Books
Tags: Book Review, Mathematics, Nonfiction