THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Pythagoreans stumbled upon it in the 5th century BC, Leonardo Da Vinci and Salvador Dali found it cool, it lies hidden in the flight path of falcons, the galactic dimensions of the Milky Way and the handy rectangle of your credit card. Meet the Golden Ratio aka ‘God’s own number.’To the untrained eye, 1.6180339887 is merely another insurmountable problem, but to the connoisseur of mathematics, it is the embodiment of beauty. Despite its long history and the fascination it held for thinkers from disciplines as varied as geometry to art to cosmology, the Golden Ratio or Phi remained less popular than its cousin, the Pi.‘’An irrational number discovered by the Pythagoreans in the 5th century BC, 1.6 also goes by the names Divine Proportion, Divine Section, Golden Mean, Golden Proportion and Golden Number,’’ explained A K Asraff, division head, Structural Dynamics and Analysis Division, Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre (LPSC), who led a talk on the Golden Ratio at the Institution of Engineers on Wednesday.‘’The ratio is closely linked to the Fibonacci Sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 etc where each number is determined by adding the two numbers preceding it) and finds inspiration in geometry, art, architecture, the animal world, human body, the universe and every day life,’’ Asraff said.For instance, artists used this ratio in their works on the assumption that it gave the most pleasing shape for a rectangle. Examples include both versions of Da Vinci’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, whose aspect ratio is 1.6, the 1955 ‘The Sacrament of the Last Supper’ by Dali where the dimensions conform to the ratio and even the hairdo in Da Vinci’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ which is a logarithmic spiral.Even the dimensions of the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt are inspired by it.‘’But the best example is the human body,’’ says Asraff. ‘’For example, the length of the body from the navel to the toe. Divide it with the height of the torso, you get this ratio. Asraff himself got hooked to the Golden Ratio after reading about it in Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’, which led him into a painstaking research on the subject.
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