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.