A Series of Essays and Demonstrations to Answer the Following Questions:

There's an old saying that gold is all around you. Perhaps you haven't seen it because it is not the precious metal gold. This is another kind of gold related to balance and beauty; beauty in art, poetry, music, and simple mathematics is manifested in the golden ratio, the divine proportion, or, what is sometimes called, the "golden section" (Huntley, p 24).

It's a golden pattern; a design repeated inside and out, so many times that you almost don't see it at all because it is imbedded everywhere in your world. For example, when you see a landscape painting, look at the place where the horizon is located. The artist probably did not put the horizon right in the center of the painting, because the painting would not look right; nor would the artist place it too close to the top or bottom of the painting for the same reason. Remember the photographer's rule: place the horizon two-thirds from the bottom of the picture? Same idea as the artist's placement in a painting.

The artist may have chosen the golden proportion. Recall that a proportion is the relationship of one part to another. In the golden or divine proportion, one side of the rectangle is longer than the other,
that is, 1.618 to 1.