The Golden Mean

I've been procrastinating over how to start this blog for some time now. Then on Tuesday I attended a talk by María Pérez-Luque on Art and Mathematics and I was completely blown away by the shear brilliance of it all. How awesome is our Creation! Then I knew that the best way to start talking about my own creativity is to start with the awesome work of our Creator. Just to put things into a little perspective...
Firstly she talked about the Golden Mean and the Fibonacci series. I had some knowledge of this through my architectural studies but by no means did I understand the magnitude of it. The Golden mean is a mathematical equation with which to measure scale and proportion in architecture and nature. It is usually expressed like this:(Sorry, I know this image is really small, but I am stilling getting the hang of uploading pictures... It will hopefully improve with time.)
It basically means there is a ratio of 1:1.618 between different components of the same thing. And this applies to everything from nature to architecture and art. It is also described as the formula for beauty because if something just looks 'wrong' it is usually not according to this formula.
The Fibonacci series is a series of numbers that looks like this: 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 ... the following number is always the sum of the 2 previous numbers (2+3=5; 3+5=8; etc) And when you divide one number by the previous one you get... ta da.... 1.618This sequence is evident everywhere in nature from pine cones and pineapples to the way leaves are attached to the branches.
A great website that explains this a lot better than I can and also has great images can be found hereHere are a few images from nature to illustrate this principal:

Enjoy!!