What did YOU get for Christmas? Chanukah? Kwanza? Boxing Day? Canadian Christmas? Is there a Canadian Christmas?
I got -- a piece of wood! My highly educated smartass cousin down in Southern California sent it, and wrote, "It's 1) a cutting board 2) a hotplate/trivet 3) a chunk of firewood and 4) a golden rectangle."
I think it's birchwood. I've rested a cup of coffee on it, cut cheese, and considered throwing it into the fire... so it's all that, plus golden rectangle. That's what it is.
Over the holidays I went down to my local bookshop in search of more information on the seemingly alchemical concept of block-of-wood-as-golden something. Over by Architecture I chatted with a builder-type person. He told his impatient wife, hey honey, here's someone who knows about the golden ratio. I can't believe it!
I basked in the golden glow for a lingering few seconds, ignorant as all get-out. I had the block of wood, I had my cousin's letter, I had the fading memory of a Liberal Arts Education, but that's all I had.
My cousin had written, "A golden rectangle is dimensional according to the golden ratio, the golden mean, or the golden proportion." It's golden. Go on...
"Make a square. Find the midpoint of one side. Extend the side that includes the midpoint. From that midpoint draw a diagonal to a corner of the square. With this diagonal as a radius..."
If you have a compass plus an unmarked ruler in your desk, do follow along.
"When you place a square in one end of a golden rectangle, the area remaining is also a golden rectangle...The series is infinite."
I love thinking about infinity. Puts me to sleep immediately.
Better than a ruler and compass would be your blocks of marble, your willing slaves, some mortar, and a large pile of bricks. Then you'd be ready for Vitruvius On Architecture, a book I found on the Architecture shelf, in a new translation by Richard Schofield.
How did the Romans plan and build their temples, their Parthenons, their catapults? It's in this Penguin paperback. Nothing on the golden mean per se, but a lot about buildings based on ratios of the human body. It's all good, if you have the bricks.
At this point I was staring outside at the pelting rain, just as I used to do most days in school. I peered into Vitruvius and came across this description of the fount of Salmacis: "It is wrongly held," he writes, "that this spring makes those who drink from it prey to erotic fixations..."
Great, but back to our search for the golden mean, rectangle, etc. For further enlightenment I turned to my old friends The Wooden Books. Each small hard cover in this series is a gem, and always too short. A Wooden Book titled The Golden Section explains everything, with illustrations. It was out of stock, so I settled on a copy of Symmetry, The Ordering Principle by David Wade. The golden things are in there.
Wade writes, "Around the end of the 12th century a young Italian customs officer (Leonardo Pisano 'Fibonnaci' Bogollo) became intrigued by (and gave his name to) a number series that has fascinated mathematicians ever since."
That's all we have time for today. Class, I certainly hope you've enjoyed your first day in Western Thought 101A. Try to be on time tomorrow. You know who I'm talking about.
