I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the onslaught of world events (20 women and children killed in Beit Hanoun, 150 Iraqi civilians kidnapped by "police," Japan's PM aiming to redraft their constitution, etc.), and thought I'd escape with another episode of quirky science. In the Washington Post today, there is an article about what makes humans see each other as beautiful.
Interestingly, Stephen Marquardt posits that beauty, like so many other neat things in nature, such as the spiral, and I think the organization of the spines on a pinecone, is determined by the golden ratio. In mathematical terms, this is expressed as: (a+b)/a = a/b = 1.618, where 1.618 is the only positive solution to the equation. This is also called the golden section or the golden mean, depending on who is talking about it. Wikipedia has a good explanation of the math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio.
The article even manages to give us a bit of poetry:
I thought Cupid aimed his dart
Deep into my fevered heart;
Instead, the arrow's lusty path
Was predetermined by . . . math.
I can't find a citation for the verse, but I know I've heard it somewhere before... Meanwhile, here's the link to the article - enjoy!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/08/AR2006110801477.html
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