The Divine Proportion

I owe this to Bo Tidwell, brilliant work sir

I have always been fascinated by numbers. The most interesting number of all is one I encountered many years ago in my Design 101 class at Auburn University. This number is identified in the mathematics community as the Greek letter phi, expressed numerically as simply 1.618. It sounds boring enough until you learn how often and where this number keeps turning up in our lives.

Phi was used by the ancient Greeks who employed it prominently in their art and architecture. It was re-introduced to the civilized world in the early 13th century, by the Italian mathematician, Fibonacci, who stumbled upon this series of numbers while conducting a study of the reproductive cycle of rabbits! Since then it has been known variously as The Golden Mean, The Divine Proportion, or the Fibonacci sequence. This mystical ratio is prevalent in all forms of life on this planet, from the microscopic structure of our DNA to the tiny spirals of a seashell to the mind boggling swirls of a galaxy. Could this be a colossal coincidence or have we literally uncovered the intrinsic building block of the universe?

The Fibonacci numbers may sound a bit intimidating, but are actually understandable on the level of basic eighth grade math. The sequence begins with one and is constructed by continually adding the previous number in the sequence to produce the next number, as follows: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, ad infinitum. Once you get to number 8, its ratio to the preceding number (5) is 1.625. With each succeeding number after that, this ratio of the last two numbers gets closer and closer to the mystical 1.618.It should also be noted that not only does phi appear repeatedly in nature, but the individual numbers in the Fibonacci sequence also make frequent appearances in interesting places like the petal count on violets or daisies or the florets in the swirls of a sunflower (counts of 55, 34, and 21); all just coincidentally specific numbers in the Fibonacci sequence!

When plotted geometrically, phi is found repeatedly in patterns and proportions in nature, the human body, art and architecture, even people's behavior. It has become so accepted now in the financial community, that many professional money managers and individual market traders use Fibonacci ratios on their charts to time when to enter or exit a trade and would not think of doing business without them.

Following are a few examples of The Divine Proportion.

Check out your own body. The distance from your belly button to your toes will be about 1.618 times as long as the distance from your belly button to the top of your head.

Check the ratio from the tip of your longest finger back to the first finger joint, from there to the second joint, then to the third joint, and from there back to your wrist joint. Each succeeding joint will be about 1.618 times greater than the one before. Then from your wrist back to your elbow will be about 1.618 times longer than the distance from your wrist to your fingertip, and from the elbow back to your shoulder will be 1.618 times longer than the distance from your elbow to your wrist. Phi is even found in our DNA spiral! That's about as fundamental as you can get.

So the next time you encounter a landscape design or an architectural structure that is not pleasing to the eye, you may find the source of the irritation may be the missing phi. And the next time your stock reaches a new high and "consolidates" for a while, you may now understand why it will then proceed to retrace (go down) back to the level of about 62% of its upward move (giving up approximately 38% of its gain, while you gnash your teeth) before it resumes its upward trend.

It never hurts to keep in touch with what Mother Nature has up her sleeve, or to be in harmony with our planet and our Creator.