I really enjoy reading popular science and math books. The Golden Ratio was one I had on my bookshelf for a while and felt really compelled to get into because it’s about Phi and being also interested in Art, I wanted to hear the math nerd’s side of the whole story about how it relates to art, natural flow etc.

The subtitle of the book is – The Story of Phi, The World’s Most Astonishing Number. So I was thinking that it was going to, well, astonish me. After explaining the reasons why a math geek would love it – it’s interesting relationships, the ratios, the infinitely repeating number, why it’s SO much cooler than Pi – he began talking about it’s relationship to art.

Or rather, it’s lack of relationship to art. He began to go down the list of every purported parallel to the art world – Greek Architecture, Italian Art, Egyption and Babylonian tablets, and completely debunking all of them. I mean, it’s the right thing to do, of course, because mathematically, the relationships were actually tenuous if not down right fabricated. But once he got through with removing every artistic relationship he could find (at least until the early 1900s when the theory started and artists started using Phi consciously) then he just continued to talk on and on about it’s brilliance as a number, and that’s where I started to get bored.

No, I’m not a mathematician. That’s obviously the problem. I understood where he was coming from, but I just have a hard time getting excited about a ratio when it’s only relevance is constrained to mathematics and a few references in nature.

Maybe the subtitle of the book should have been -
The Story of Phi – How it came to be astonishing when it really wasn’t.