THE GOLDEN RATIO IS NOT THAT GOLDEN

1.1680... or so-called the golden ratio has been held as the secret elixir of beauty by architects, designers, and artists. an architect likes Le Corbusier, a painter like Salvador Dalí and Michelangelo. The Mona Lisa and The Parthenon are all said to incorporate it.
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But that’s absurd. It’s a design myth and there is no data to back it up quite the contrary, Keith Devlin (British mathematician) has worked with the university’s psychology department at Stanford, to ask hundreds of students over the years what their favorite rectangle is. He shows the students collections of rectangles, then asks them to pick their favorite one. If the assumption that the golden ratio gives an aesthetic appeal is true, then the student will be more likely to pick out the rectangle closest to a golden rectangle, but that wasn’t the case, they pick seemingly at random.

The golden ratio is an irrational number which means it can’t be simplified as a fraction. 3/2, 5/3, 8/5, 13/8 all these fractions are floating around the true value but never reach it, we can prove this mathematically, but I don’t want to bore you with the math.

Pi(π), Euler’s Number(ϱ), Avogadro's Number all of which exists in the natural world but none of which had been connected to beauty. Where did the link between the golden ratio and beauty come from? Will I am glad you asked the history of the ratio is somewhat vague and up to debate the been said...

the story begins with the Fibonacci Sequence, which consists of the sum of two preceding numbers, starting from 0 and 1

0+1=1

1+1=2

1+2=3

2+3=5

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0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89

This sequence is approaching the golden ratio as a limit if you divide two preceding numbers, and the higher the number is the closest you are to the true value of the golden ratio. Fibonacci wrote this sequence in his book Liber Abaci in 1227AD, the Greeks also have known this sequence in 200BC but none of them has associated it with beauty, they wear inserted in the sequence from a mathematical point of view.

Skip 300 years and we get to Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk who wrote a book called De Divina Proportione in 1509 which was named after the golden ratio. The odd thing in his book he doesn’t argue for architecture based on a golden ration, he instead promoted the Vitruvian system of rational proportions, Pacioli was a close friend with Leonardo da Vinci, Since Da Vinci illustrated De Divina Proportione, it was soon being said that Da Vinci himself used the golden ratio as the secret math behind his exquisitely beautiful paintings, which Da Vinci had never acknowledged.

Adolf Zeising is the main suspect for the good reputation of the golden ratio and its connection to beauty. he was a German psychologist, mathematician, and philosopher, he says that the golden ratio was a universal law that described:

“beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art… which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical.”

The problem is that his work and writing is far from scientific and had been built merely on personal observations, one of the most famous examples from his writing that the golden ratio could be applied to the human body by taking the height from a person’s navel to his toes, then dividing it by the person’s total height.

This so wrong I don’t know from where to start, first it not true if you take a large set of people the values vary from 1.4 to 1.7 and even if the average is 1.6 these are just arbitrary body parts, put-in to a formula, it’s like he is trying to cruet something from nothing Devlin says:

“When measuring anything as complex as the human body, it’s easy to come up with examples of ratios that are very near to 1.6.”

You are probably familiar with standard A4, A3, A2... paper format the standard ratio between its height and width is √2 do you know why that is?... so, the paper can be scaled upward and downward by half. Next time you think of using the golden ratio in your design just ask yourself self WHY?!