04- The Golden Ratio |
Let’s talk about the fact that our brains can sense when things are well-proportioned, aka balanced, and those perfect proportions make us interpret beauty, aka harmony. Many moons ago, early mathematicians and artists and think-y people sought to create order by mimicking the order found in nature. And somehow these ancient scholars managed to study nature and turn it into math. Euclid, Vitruvius, and the likes recognized that when two parts of a whole formed a ratio equal to the ratio formed by the larger part and the whole, it looked nice. Did you get all that? That’s fine. Just know that this little equation is the basis for the golden section—the proportional system that, like, kinda defines beauty to our eyes. Euclid called it “The Divine Proportion,” which is a crazy thought. Divine means “of or from God,” and here he is suggesting that these proportions were God-made, as if there is a higher power who has established the laws of beauty for the universe. Sweet stuff.
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