Now on to Phi. The ancient
Greeks, in addition to giving us democracy, also figured out a few
things about art and architecture. They discovered that some
rectangles seemed to have more pleasing proportions than others.
The most pleasing proportion was when the length of the long side
was
1.618
times the length of the short side. This ratio, called the Golden
Ratio, or if you really wanted a more authoritarian image, The
Divine Proportion, is represented by the Greek letter Phi
(
f
) ;it rhymes with pie. This ratio shows up in
much of their art and architecture. Incidentally the ancient
Egyptians also knew and used this number in the proportions of
their temples and pyramids. And they did it thousands of years
before the Greeks got onto it.
Later mathematicians
formalized the definition of
fin terms of a ratio of line
lengths.
|
|
It also turns out that this is not just a
judgment about how pretty things ought to look. This same number
comes up in the way branches are spaced around the trunk of a
plant, in how the spiral of a nautilus shell or sunflower seed
heads are structured, and in how populations grow.
One, among
many, curious property
of this number is that:
f-1 = 1/f
Not necessarily useful, but
interesting. |
Leonardo of Pisa (aka Fibonacci) invented a
series, called surprisingly enough, Fibonacci Numbers. In this set
of numbers, where each number is the sum of the two previous
numbers (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,……), the ratio of one term to the previous
approaches
f as the number of terms gets large.
So
f shows up in mathematics, in
biology, in economics, in physics, and even in theology. It’s not
just a pretty face. Like pi and e, phi is irrational and has no
repeating pattern of decimal digits.
f has been computed to over 200
decimal digits but you will only need the first 22 of these to
decipher the code where the numbers translate into other different
coordinate numerals.
f,
with
a little help from Leonardo, will lead you to the cache:
N
4181377
31.8901
W
3210
67654181.017711377
The scene from this cache
is becoming a common sight all around Florida : a shopping mall.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, they are part of the
landscape. While you’re
here you can grab a quick bite, or shop ‘till you
drop. The amazing thing
is that you are less than 1.5 miles from some of the most pristine,
almost primeval, landscape in the county, the Cracker Creek branch
of Spruce Creek. Congratulations to Postal Break for
FTF!!