The Golden Ratio?

outfctrl

I was in a meeting this morning looking at a set of plans.  It is 7 fountains and a center piece.  The shape is like a conk shell starting from the middle and expanding out.

The designer said it mimics the "Golden Ratio" that is supposed to be an ideal proportion for humans.

This was way over my head.  He said it has to do with mathematics.

Another example he said is the pyramids.

He even said it  could be used to determine the stock market

I dont believe this

Can anyone explain this Golden Ratio in laymens terms or is it impossible?

 

Thanks All

outfctrl

I knew it was complicated

 

Pynda

There's a fairly good (though overly complex IMO) explanation of it at Wikipedia. It is a subjective classical ideal of beauty rather than anything to do with practicality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

Grunty

Originally posted by Pynda

There's a fairly good (though overly complex IMO) explanation of it at Wikipedia. It is a subjective classical ideal of beauty rather than anything to do with practicality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

So it's an attempt to make opinion of what looks good into a clinical definition/formula that will be different for anyone who thinks it's important.

Aelfinn

The golden ratio is an irrational number that occaisonally appears in nature, and has as a result been adopted for architecture and other manmade applications. It is considered by some to be rather aesthetically pleasing to the eye, although I have yet to see a significant difference between a building built to that standard and one that is otherwise similar but was not.

The ratio is mathematically related to another relationship known as the Fibonacci sequence, and appears in a number of forms, principally the "golden rectangle" (with width ~1.618 times its height) and the "golden spiral" (formed by linking squares that have a ~1.618 relationship to its neighbor)

Its importance has been greatly exxagerated. For a good while, people claimed it appeared in just about every aspect of nature from nautilus shells to tree branches to DNA helixes to the ratio of our own limbs, in spite of the fact that most of the examples failed to come even close far more often than not. Spirals do indeed appear quite often, but they vary greatly in terms of their curvature, even within the same species, and very rarely come as tightly coiled as the golden spiral is.

Frankly, I'd suggest dismissing this guy as a bullshitter if you are able, either he is deliberately taking advantage of a centuries old false fad in order to charge more money, or he was taken in by a centuries old false fad and is bad enough at math to never have realized it.

As for the stock market... the concept that any relatively simple number sequence could predict that mess is laughable at best. Hell, the people whose jobs it is to predict and understand the market are far more often than not quite confused about how the thing works even when making an accurate prediction.