Mario Livio: The Golden Ratio: The Story Of Phi, The World's Most Astonishing Number

The outer reaches of math are home to a slew of mystic numbers, but few share the ethereal weightiness of the Golden Ratio, an object of scientific and artistic fascination throughout the ages. Identified by the Greek letter phi and precious aliases like the Golden Number and the Divine Proportion, the enigmatic figure results from the dissection of a line into two uneven segments, such that the shorter length compares to 1.618… units of the other. Part devotional calling and part mathematician's parlor game, the search for the never-ending number in unlikely places serves as the premise of The Golden Ratio, a neat but ultimately nagging attempt to equate math with myth. Weaving through 4,000 years of history, author Mario Livio takes a mannered enthusiast's approach to his subject. As a wide-eyed math fan, he delights in the eerie reoccurrence of the number in natural and manmade processes; as a practicing astrophysicist, he unravels countless yarns that have touted the Golden Ratio as a sort of aesthetic quantifier handed down from the heavens. Starting with the number's rumored use in the design of the Great Pyramid, Livio traces the Golden Ratio's ostensible role in the evolution of numerology, astronomy, music, architecture, and painting; seemingly everything from planetary orbits to melody to one-point perspective rub against the fateful figure. Livio dismisses nearly all such connections as fanciful pseudo-science and "number juggling," but he does navigate an infectious run through the equations and patterns whose presence mathematicians liken to the "Eye of God." To the followers of Pythagoras, the Golden Ratio's manifestation in the angles of pentagrams governed concrete and spiritual symbol systems. To Renaissance painters like Piero della Francesca and Modernists such as Piet Mondrian, the shape of the so-called Golden Rectangle supposedly accounted for aesthetic pleasantness. But as Livio confirms in a string of increasingly comic caveats, the Golden Ratio's role in most storied tales is largely oversold. For all its lyrical passages on Fibonacci number sequences and the figures behind spiral patterns echoed by conch shells, bird flight, and the Milky Way, The Golden Ratio delves into math too deep for general-audience wading. Beyond that, the reflections from the number pool prove too fleeting to steer a math-scared skeptic off course.