360 likes | 1.02k Views
The Golden Ratio. Aditya Krishnan 7.2 Math. Introduction. Note: Of course, inner beauty is more important .
E N D
The Golden Ratio Aditya Krishnan 7.2 Math
Introduction Note: Of course, inner beauty is more important Currently in Math, our unit is Ratio. We have learnt about proportion, scaling an object to a size that can be drawn, interpreting the size of a diagram drawn to scale and the Golden Ratio. This activity is to give us a deeper understanding about the Golden Ratio by allowing us to experiment with various resources to collect and analyze information about it. We will ourselves learn about the places the Golden Ratio is found, as well as how it affects the way someone looks. This exciting activity will teach us that physical beauty can be mathematical.
AOI’s and Unit Question I have created a Unit Question and chosen a few Areas of Interaction that I feel suit this topic. My Unit Question for this project: How can the study of the Golden Ratio aid us in designing more aesthetically pleasing art and architecture? The AOI’s I have chosen: • Community and Service • Human Ingenuity The reflections on the Unit Question and the Areas of Interaction are at the end of the project.
The Golden Ratio Also called the ‘Golden Section’ or the ‘Golden Proportion’, the Golden Ratio is approximately equivalent to 1.618033988749895. This is represented by the Greek letter φ (phi), like how 3.14… is represented by π (pi). The Golden Ratio is irrational, meaning it goes on forever. Even before the Renaissance, architects and artists have scaled their designs using the Golden Ratio. They used the Golden Rectangle the most often, which they felt looked pleasing to the eye. The way to calculate the Golden Ratio is 1+ , which is half of 3.23606797749979. That is how the Golden Ratio is calculated to be 1.618033988749895. 1+√5 2
φ (Phi) Phi is the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. The uppercase version of Phi is Φ, while the more commonly used one is the lowercase, which is φ. There are many mathematical uses for this alphabet. A few of the things it represents are: • The Golden Ratio (1.618) • A ring or group homomorphism • The second angle after θ (Theta) • The polar angle from the z-axis • The Azimuthal angle from the x-axis It was the idea of Mark Barr, to use the letter φ for representing the golden ratio.
The Golden Rectangle and Triangle Note: The Golden Rectangle and the Golden Triangle diagrams have been generated by me using only auto shapes. The Golden Rectangle is a rectangle in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter side is 1.6:1, which is the Golden Ratio. It can be created on the computer very easily: • Draw a rectangle • Change the size to 1.6cm and 1 cm using the size options • Click on the ‘Size and Position’ arrow • Tick ‘Lock Aspect Ratio’ • To change the size, drag the rectangle by the four dots on the corners. (Pictures on the next page) The Golden Triangle is an isosceles triangle in which one of the two equal sides (a) and the base (b) form the Golden Ratio when put in the ratio of a:b. Below are pictures of a Golden Rectangle and a Golden Triangle Golden Rectangle Golden Triangle
Note: All these diagrams have been generated by me using only ‘Print Screen’, text boxes, circles and lines. All items that have been ‘Print Screened’ have been created by me. Size options Size and Position arrow Lock Aspect Ratio Dots to drag and resize to scale
Fibonacci Numbers A diagram showing the Fibonacci numbers. The area of the square is the sum of the previous two square areas. Fibonacci numbers are a sequence in which a number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence. The first few Fibonacci numbers are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 34, 55, 89... Fibonacci numbers are directly related to the Golden Ratio and φ (Phi). When a Fibonacci number is in a ratio with the Fibonacci number before it, and that ratio is simplified, you will end up with a number extremely close to the Golden Ratio. For example, • 8:5 :: 1.6:1 • 13:8 :: 1.625:1 • 21:13 :: 1.6154:1 • 34:21 :: 1.619:1 • 55:34 :: 1.6176:1 But the Fibonacci number ratio closest to the Golden Ratio (Approximately 1.618) is: ___ 89:55 :: 1.618:1 Fibonacci numbers are found in everyday life. Your body has one nose, two eyes, three parts in the leg and five fingers on each hand. A pine cone has five spirals facing one way and eight spirals facing the other way. A pineapple has eight spirals going one way and thirteen facing the other way. These are everyday examples of the Golden Ratio being present in nature.
Family of a Drone A honeybee colony is made up of Drones, Queens and Workers. The females (queens and workers) have a drone and a queen as parents. However, a drone is hatched from unfertilised eggs, laid by a queen but not fertilized by a male drone. Therefore, they only have one parent. The family tree on the next page illustrates the fact that a drone has: • 1 parent • 2 grandparents • 3 great-grandparents • 5 great-great-grandparents • 8 great-great-great-grandparents • 13 great-great-great-great-grandparents • 21 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents • 34 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents • 55 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents • 89 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents • 144 great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents • Etc. All these bold and underlined numbers are Fibonacci Numbers. The family of a Drone happens to relate to the Golden Ratio!
Family of a Drone Note: This entire diagram has been generated by me using only text boxes and lines Queen Drone Queen Queen Drone Queen Drone Queen Queen Drone
Investigation After researching about the Golden Ratio, I will now start finding out about it in nature and the human body. However, this time I won’t get the figures off the Internet or books, but I will go out and actually measure it. I will use a 30 cm ruler, as I will be working only with plants and parts of the body. The ruler will be convenient to travel around with and it will not accidentally hit someone while being transported, like a metre scale might. I will work using centimetres, as they fit the ruler I will be using. I am not measuring things that are too big, so I will not need to use metres; centimetres will be adequate. Lets begin the Investigation!
Items Used • Ruler • Photographs • Pen/Pencil/Eraser • Laptop • Internet • PowerPoint • MS Paint • Sunflower • Sea Shells • Photoshop
Ratio of Parts of My Face Note: All the measurements are in centimetres. (Top of head to chin):(Width of head at ear level) =19.5:13 :: 1.5:1 (Top of head to pupil):(Pupil to edge of lip) =10.5:6 ::1.8:1 (Nose tip to chin):(Lips to chin) = 9:5 ::1.8:1 (Nose tip to chin):(Pupil to nose tip) =9:5 ::1.8:1 (Width of nose at base):(Nose tip to lips) =3.5:3 ::1.2:1 (Outside distance between eyes):(Hairline to pupil) =5:5 ::1:1
Ratio of Parts of My Face Note: All the measurements are in centimetres. (Length of Lips):(Width of nose at base) =5:3 ::1.6:1 (Hairline to chin):(Hairline to bottom of nose) =16:10 ::1.6:1 (Width of bridge of nose):(Width of eye) =1.5:1 ::1.5:1 (Width of mouth):(Width of teeth) =0.9:0.5 ::1.8:1 Average Ratio= 1.5:1 The ratios are extremely close to each other, but a few are in the range of 1.5-1.8. A few are close to the Golden Ratio, such as the first two on this page but otherwise, most of them are either higher or lower than the Golden Ratio.
Comparing Faces of Classmates Note: All measurements are rounded off to the nearest two decimal places.
Comparing Faces of Classmates The average result in the previous page for the ‘Bridge: Eye’ ratio shows that the Golden Ratio is found in children as well, not just adults. This is because as we grow, our body grows in proportion, and that ratio is set from childhood. Compared to the adult, it is different because the classmates are closer to the Golden Ratio for the ‘Bridge: Eye’ ratio than the adult, but the adult is closer for the ‘Mouth: Teeth’. This is because nowadays, most people don’t like to show their teeth while smiling, and so smile with their mouth mostly closed. This way, only a small percentage of their teeth is visible. In the pictures accessible to me, some of my classmates were not even ready for the picture to be taken, and so weren’t smiling the way they naturally smile in school, and were smiling in a very artificial way. So, their result got affected slightly.
Faces of Celebrities As seen in the above results, ALL the ratios of the actors are the same. All the actors were measured at the same width, although the heights differed. This was just for me to have a uniformed layout. There is a possibility that many actors have the above ratios, and like the Golden Ratio making someone look good, the above ratio is another proportion that makes someone’s face look nice. There is also a possibility that the Mouth: Teeth ratio is 1:1 because their smile may be slightly artificial, and therefore, teeth is visible throughout the smile.
Comparing The Face of an Adult The two ratios for an adult are not the exactly same, but they are extremely close to each other; there is just a 0.1:1 difference in them. The Mouth: Teeth ratio is more than the Bridge: Eye ratio by a small margin, so one could say that the two ratios are similar. They are both not very close to the Golden Ratio. The second ratio, Mouth: Teeth, is quite close to that of the actors. There is just a 0.1:1 difference in that as well.
Comparing The Face of an Adult to a Celebrity The face of the adult compared to that of the film stars is not very different, but not very close either. For the Bridge: Eye ratio, the actors are closer to the golden ratio than the adult. This may make them look more attractive. However, the adult is closer to the golden ratio for the Mouth: Teeth ratio. This may be because the adult’s smile is more natural, and therefore their teeth are not covered by their smile. The actor’s smiles may be slightly unnatural, which may be why there is no part of their inner-mouth shown apart from their teeth.
The Parthenon The Parthenon in Acropolis, Athens was one of the first temples in Ancient World to be made perfectly like the Golden Rectangle. It was a temple dedicated to Athena, the goddess of knowledge. Below is a picture of the Parthenon and how the different parts of it fit perfectly into a Golden Rectangle. The grid that has been fitted above the picture is like the grid seen in the slide about the Fibonacci numbers; each box is equal to the sum of the previous two. The whole rectangle is a Golden Rectangle, as are the smaller rectangles within it.
Uses of the Golden Ratio in Art One of the greatest artists who used the Golden Ratio for painting human figures was Leonardo da Vinci. He presented the Golden Ratio in his famous sketch, ‘The Vitruvian Man’ (Picture bottom right). This sketch was drawn in 1492, and is named after a Roman architect Vitruvius who agreed with Leonardo da Vinci about using certain proportion of the human body (i.e. The golden ratio) in architecture. It is also believed that the Golden Ratio has been used in the Mona Lisa. Salvador Dalí, a Spanish painter, used the Golden Rectangle as the size of his canvases. A study conducted in 1999 proved that out of the 350 artworks checked, over a 100 of them were using the Golden Ratio. In Salvador’s work ‘The Sacrament of the Last Supper’ (Picture bottom left), he drew a dodecahedron that had sides proportional to each other in the Golden Ratio.
Uses of The Golden Ratio in Greek Architecture The Temple of Artemis The temple of Artemis was a Greek temple which was in Ephesus, Turkey around 550 BC. It was dedicated to Artemis, the goddess of hunting and wild animals. She is the twin sister of the sun, Apollo and the daughter of Zeus and Leto. She is represented by bow and arrows, as she is a Hunter. Her Roman equivalent is Diana. The temple was one of the first to be made entirely of marble and was one of the largest in its time. Built on a platform measuring 131.1 x 78.9m, it was even larger than the Parthenon.
The Temple of Artemis Front view dimensions: Length: Width= 5.9:2.5 :: 2.36:1 (Red) Length: Height = 5.9:4.45 :: 1.32:1 (Yellow) Base : Triangle Length= 6.56:2.96:: 2.21:1 (Orange) Side view dimensions: Length: Width= 7.2: 2.6 :: 2.7:1 (Red) Length: Height= 7.2: 2.81 :: 2.56 (Yellow) There are no ratios found that are close to the Golden Ratio. This may be because the monument was built and designed a long time ago, before the Greeks started to utilise the Golden Ratio in their architecture.
Uses of the Golden Ratio in Nature In addition to being found in the body, pine-cones and pineapples, the golden ratio can be found in various other aspects of nature as well, such as the shell. A the distance between the spirals of a shell follow the Fibonacci numbers and the Golden Ratio. The diagram at the bottom shows the distance between the areas of the shell growing. This is easy to understand because of blocks that are on the diagram. These boxes are like those in the page about Fibonacci Numbers; each box’s area is the area of the previous two boxes. This shows that the shell grows in proportion to the Golden Ratio.
Uses of the Golden Ratio in Nature A very famous and known example of the Golden Ratio in nature is a sunflower. Sunflowers have spirals winding in two directions: clockwise and anticlockwise. But when they are counted, they are not equal. Sometimes it is 144: 89, 89:55 or 55:34. One can clearly see that they are all Fibonacci numbers. It is extremely interesting that these Fibonacci numbers are in sequential order. As we know, when we divide two consecutive Fibonacci numbers, we will get a number close to the Golden Ratio. Here are the results rounded off to three decimal places: 144:89 :: 1.618:1 89:55 :: 1.618:1 55:34 :: 1.618:1 All three of these ratios, when simplified, are extremely close to the Golden Ratio when rounded off. The Golden Ratio is also 1.618 when rounded off to three decimal places! This shows that the sunflower is an example of the Golden Ratio in nature.
Reflection on AOI’s Community and Service As seen in the page about the Parthenon, the Golden Ratio can be utilised to create more aesthetically pleasing buildings and monuments for the community. Also having learnt about the family of the Drone relating to Fibonacci numbers, we can use exciting examples like that to interest students about Fibonacci numbers. If you give a student the family diagram of drone, and ask them to find out how many parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. the Drone has, then they will explore and learn the Fibonacci number themselves. This will teach them about it in an interactive way, which is a way in which I learn very fast. Human Ingenuity It is human intelligence that has discovered that the Golden Ratio is aesthetically pleasing. This enables humans to use the Golden Ratio to make nice architecture for everyone to appreciate. Humans can also recognise the people who have the Golden Ratio and are good looking. However, the bad consequence is that some people might make fun of people who do no have the Golden Ratio in their body.
Reflection on Unit Question How can the study of the Golden Ratio aid us in designing more aesthetically pleasing art and architecture? We can use the Golden Ratio for geometrical shapes, such as triangles, rectangles and other polygons. This will make that shape look good, as the shape will have the Golden Ratio. We can then use these shapes in our architectural designs. The windows, doors, height and width of the building, roof, false ceiling heights, geometrical designs and carvings. This will make the building look very attractive and it will be appreciated more. For art, the same can be drawn. The canvas size of the artwork can follow the Golden Ratio and if a human body is being drawn, it can be extremely accurate using the Golden Ratio. This is why the Greek carvings are said to be very accurate in size.
Reflection on Project I have learnt a whole load about the Golden Ratio, Fibonacci numbers, φ (Phi), where we find them in everyday life and how we can improve art and architecture with the knowledge of it. Since I was allowed to research and make the project in my own speed, I was able to grasp more information and understand more about the topic. I knew what the Fibonacci numbers were, and how they were formed, but I didn’t know that they were called Fibonacci numbers. I also utilized various modes of research, such as actually testing whatever I could to ensure that the information I was receiving was accurate, such as the seashells or the sunflower. Since I couldn’t actually go and measure the Greek monuments, I cross checked the information in various websites, to ensure quality.
Bibliography • http://www.intmath.com/Numbers/mathOfBeauty.php [Accessed 5 April 2010 11:39am] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio [Accessed 5 April 2010 11:54am] • http://www.insidegraphics.com/textures/images/photoshop_texture_contrast.jpg [Accessed 5 April 2010 1:23pm] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi [Accessed 5 April 2010 1:28pm] • http://www.theproblemsite.com/thegoldenratio/nature.asp [Accessed 5 April 2010 2:38pm] • http://www.poweredtemplates.com/_src_clipart/00001/clipart_b.jpg [Accessed 5 April 2010 3:59pm] • http://truthdive.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/internet_explorer_logo.jpg [Accessed 5 April 2010 4:07pm] • http://www.smccd.edu/accounts/jung/images/powerpoint-logo.jpg [Accessed 5 April 2010 4:13pm] • http://www.sheeptech.com/images/2008/01/icon_mspaint.png [Accessed 5 April 2010 4:16pm] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number [Accessed 6 April 2010 9:30am] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rectangle [Accessed 6 April 2010 11:17am] • http://warrensburg.k12.mo.us/7wonders/artemis/diana2.jpeg [Accessed 6 April 2010 12:16pm] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Artemis [Accessed 6 April 2010 12:16pm]
Bibliography • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis [Accessed 6 April 2010 12:20pm] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_triangle_(mathematics) [Accessed 6 April 2010 2:33pm] • http://www.frogview.com/uploadimages4/49551a642e5dc5.07604923frogview-gallery.jpg [Accessed 6 April 2010 2:48pm] • http://jancology.com/blog/archives/da-vinci-vitruvian-man.jpg [Accessed 6 April 2010 3:11pm] • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Dal%C3%AD [Accessed 6 April 2010 3:18pm] • http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/jblastsupper.jpg [Accessed 6 April 2010 3:26pm] • http://im.rediff.com/movies/2005/jan/10hrithik.jpg [Accessed 6 April 2010 3:31pm] • http://www.rankopedia.com/CandidatePix/2136.gif [Accessed 6 April 2010 3:37pm] • http://www.celebritysmackblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/megan-fox-catwoman.jpg [Accessed 6 April 2010 3:54pm] • http://www.fotosearch.com/bthumb/CSP/CSP164/k1646052.jpg [Accessed 7 April 2010 2:43pm] • http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci_17.htm [Accessed 7 April 2010 4:35pm]