Forgotten Streams ...
Forget the Golden Ratio ... |
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... | it's time to get real ... |
Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History, |
"The Renaissance friar Fra Luca Pacioli singled out one of Euclid's irrational ratios - the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio - and proclaimed that it was a metaphor for the Almighty because divine nature is irrational in the sense of being beyond the understanding of rational mortals. Thus Pacioli associated Euclid's ratio with theology. But neither Pacioli nor the ancients associated the ratio with art or beauty.
That association was not made until the early 1800s, when German mathematicians first referred to Euclid's division (sectioning) of the line as "golden"; adopted from them and popularized by Adolf Zeising's New System of Human Proportions (1854), the term became central to the (false) historical claim that ancient, medieval, and Renaissance artists and architects had used the ratio to determine ideal proportions." p.73.
Gamwell (2016).
Lynn Gamwell (2016) Mathematics and Art: A Cultural History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691165288.
(Thank you to PUP for the review copy - more to follow.)
I often think of Millingford Brook local to me as forgotten. It runs through and under (A58) in Ashton, Wigan, Lancashire, UK.
My source:
Heathcote, E. (2020) Constructions for the city, Life&Arts, FT Weekend, 14-15 March, p.16.