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Mariacarla Frippa

The Golden Ratio: Perfection in Nature

According to Pythagoras, numbers govern the world, and through them, we can grasp the essence of creation. Everything that surrounds us follows a harmonious balance. Mathematics can be used as a tool to allow us to describe our universe, being the keystone that stabilizes our understanding of our environment. What we said is evidenced by the Golden Ratio, also called Divine Proportion. The Golden Ratio is a universal numerical constant, indicates the irrational number 1.61833..., obtained by cutting a segment in such a way that the proportion between the major part and the minor part is the same as there is between the entire segment and the major part, or (a + b): a =a :b.

The Fibonacci sequence (each number is the sum of the two that precede it) is an approximation of the golden section, in fact, Kepler discovered that the ratio between two consecutive numbers of the Fibonacci sequence approximated more and more precisely the golden number. We find this ratio everywhere: in physics, music, botany and also in art. Since antiquity, the search for harmony and perfection was governed by divine proportion, which became almost an obsession for artists and was found in many works: The Riace bronzes, Botticelli's Venus, Da Vinci's Monnalisa and Vitruvian Man, Michelangelo's Adam, the Parthenon. The first written testimony traceable dates back to 1835 in the book Die Reine Elementar Mathematik, in which the German mathematician Martin Ohm writes "is called "golden section"", he writes about the subject but is not the creator. The Divine Proportion represents the symbol of harmony also because it is present in the DNA molecule and in many other natural structures such as sunflower, moreover, the length of the phalanges of our hand follows the Fibonacci succession and allows the hand to close perfectly in a fist just according to a golden aspiration. Our brain would also show a natural preference for lines and drawn shapes that recall a mathematical relationship. Several philosophers and artists with time have come to consider it as an ideal of beauty and harmony pushing themselves to search for it and recreate it in the anthropic environment, evidence of this is the history of the name that recently has taken the name of golden and divine.





Mariacarla Frippa


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  2. Shan Newspaper


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