Phi Day: why today — 1/6/18 — is golden!
The first four digits of the golden ratio, 1.618, features in nautilus shells, the Parthenon, and the Fibonacci sequence — and won’t happen again for a century
In certain circles, including some of the ones I travel in, there’s great excitement about today’s date. We won’t see its like again for another century. What makes today so special? The date — 1/6/18 — lines up with the first four digits of the golden ratio, a mathematical constant that’s roughly equal to 1.618 and is commonly denoted by the Greek letter phi, which looks a bit like the letter "p" but with an extra loop on the left-hand side of the vertical axis. So let’s celebrate Phi Day by considering some of the wonderful things the golden ratio has to offer. The golden ratio is the proportion that arises when we cut a line into two parts so that the ratio of the whole length to the long part is equal to the ratio of the lengths of the two parts. Many find those sorts of proportions aesthetically pleasing: Le Corbusier, for example, based his system of architecture on them [J1]; they may also have figured into the Parthenon; and mathematically, the golden ratio is cool because i...
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