It’s also the slowest converging continued fraction.
You’ve got the title and publishers correct, but it’s actually by H.E. Huntley.
Incidentally, while Huntley doesn’t give a specific reference, he notes (p62) that the study measuring navels was conducted by a crank who also believed that pi = 6(phi)[sup]2[/sup]/5. Though I doubt they’re the only person to have proposed the latter, it does suggest this may be the “R.G.” who’s the example Underwood Dudley uses in the section on phi in his Mathematical Cranks (MAA, 1992, p245-50) and who had a track record of pestering the likes of Martin Gardner.
Don’t blame Slug. Cecil relies on me to convey his instructions to the art department, and I got the letters mixed up. It’s fixed now. I hope. My apologies.
Here’s an interesting site concerning Phi’s relationship to our perception of beauty. They don’t say that Phi is universal, just that the closer faces conform to Phi proportions, the more likely we are to perceive them as beautiful.
Phi is a ratio, so you can consider it to be more than 1 or less than 1 (depending on which way you’re comparing). I’ve usually seen the convention that 1.618… is phi.
I don’t see how to derive 1/phi from what we start with.
Anyway, here’s a derivation that uses no assumptions about phi. Take AB = x and BC = y. So AC = x + y.
We want (AC / AB) = (AB / BC), which means that (x + y)/x = x/y. Cross-multiply to get xy + y[sup]2[/sup] = x[sup]2[/sup], which rearranges to x[sup]2[/sup] - xy - y[sup]2[/sup] = 0.
By the quadratic formula, x = (y + y*sqrt(5))/2. Since one of those roots is negative, we can throw it out. Therefore, x/y = (1 + sqrt(5))/2.
I thoroughly enjoyed Cecil’s column on phi. I hope Cecil will comment further on The Da Vinci Code. I thought the book was a steamy lump of doodoo, and it puzzles me that it’s been such a best seller. I love Cecil’s delicious little jabs at Brown:
Yeah, I got two(!) copies of it for Christmas but I have only been able to make it through the first couple of chapters. I might try it again on the trip I’ll be taking soon, but I haven’t been able to work up any enthusiasm for the idea. It’s like trying to look forward to a prostate exam.
RR
You may then enjoy reading, oh, any one of the threads about Da Vinci code in Cafe Society. Some folks tagged it as a “mindless, fun read,” but the rest of us pretty much tore it to quivering shreds, and then peed on the shreds.
Hopefully, that means people who post to the SDMB are either smart enough to reject it out of hand, or smart enough to do the research needed to indicate it is pretty much junk.
Aside from that, I don’t know. It could be a confounding factor we’re not accounting for, a small statistical glitch that makes Dopers less likely to fully track best-seller lists with regards to Cafe Society posts. Maybe we largely conform to the geek stereotype and follow science fiction, fantasy, and horror more closely than `mainstream’ fiction. With the democritization of Internet access this is less likely, but the makeup of the SDMB’s core clientele is skewed for other reasons.
Of course, spinning statistical hypotheses like this is pretty much pointless. But I think one or more of my factors could easily account for this lack.