November 2021
Bio Note: I teach sociology at San Jose State University, from where I organize the Hands on Thailand program. My most recent books are Harboring Happiness: 101 Ways To Be Happy (Beacon, 2021), Sweet Nothings (Hekate, 2020), about the nature of haiku and the concept of nothing, and Eating the Earth: The Truth About What We Eat (Smashwords, 2020).
The Golden Ratio
0 ...
1 I
1 am
2 writing
3 a poem
5 of Fibonacci
8 his mathematical sequence
13 elegantly holding many secrets of nature
21 he discovered that 1.618 is, apparently, the golden ratio
34 born and died in the beautiful city of Pisa during the twelfth, thirteenth centuries, popularizing Hindu-Arabic numbers
55 in Europe, the western world, thereby transforming history, philosophy, and mathematics, and perhaps much else, for the better, making us the fortunate, unearned beneficiaries of Fibonacci’s wisdom
89 his local landmark Tower of Pisa, already begun and already starting to lean, I wonder if Fibonacci drew any inspiration from it, or dread, perhaps awe, and could he have imagined that both this tower and his mathematics would be so influential to so many, as both were so influential in his own personal life
144 Fibonacci was a traveler, primarily for the purpose of study, eagerly journeying to Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence, perhaps elsewhere as well, learning much from Arab and other masters of his craft, practicing various different numeral systems and various different methods of calculation, seeking to unravel some of the beautiful mysteries embedded in our precious world, while also proving that the more answers we get, the more questions we will have, which is extraordinarily exciting for sure
233 let us briefly dive into the numerical waters for a closer perspective: summing the two previous numbers in the sequence to derive the next number, as Indian mathematicians had done six centuries earlier, Fibonacci calculated up to two hundred thirty three, then by dividing the previous number by the current one, meaning two hundred thirty three divided by one hundred forty four in this case, we get 1.618, a golden ratio that can be found around us in both nature and culture, including human biology, hurricanes, nautilus and snail shells, pine cones and flowers, the great pyramids and the Parthenon, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Last Supper, music, design, advertising, and elsewhere, demonstrating that mathematical alchemy is possible, if we are properly prepared and sufficiently open to it
©2021 Dan Brook
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