The title of this musing is the same title I gave to one of the first essays I wrote as a freshmen at Park College. It already shows a penchant for playing with words, for you can, if you are lucky enough to have made a strike, go to an assayer’s office and have your gold assayed. And “assay” is only one letter away from “essay.”
While I enjoy playing with words, Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1250), an Italian mathematician, enjoyed playing with numbers. He is famous for the Fibonacci sequence, a series of numbers that goes like this:
0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 . . .
Notice, of course, the 34, and then notice that the number that follows any two numbers is the sum of those two numbers:
0 + 1 = 1
1 + 1 = 2
1 + 2 + 3
3 + 2 = 5
and so on . . .
This sequence is not confined to the abstract realm—far from it. It turns up all over the place in nature, such as the spirals in shells, pine cones, and sunflower heads.
As the sequence advances, the ratio of any two numbers approaches the Golden Ratio, a ratio that finds pervasive expression in art, architecture, and anatomy. The Golden Ratio is designated as phi (φ) and its value is given by this equation: φ = ½ (1 + √5) = 1.6180339887 . . .
The Fibonacci ratios oscillate around this number, back and forth, in a chiasmic to and fro, approaching it closer and ever closer . . .
1.0000 = 1/1
2.0000 = 2/1
1.5000 = 3/2
1.6667 = 5/3
1.6000 = 8/5
1.6250 = 13/8
1.6154 = 21/13
1.6190 = 34/21
. . . but never quite reaching it. Showing that its worth was assayed very high indeed, the Golden Ratio was also called the divine proportion, the golden section, and the golden mean.