I was out for my walk the other night at a local park, and I noticed that the young, fit woman in front of me had a pelvic girdle/surrounding area that was roughly a circle (I first typed “roughly a perfect circle,” but that’s a contradiction in terms).
A friend of mine described a woman’s side view as a pair of S’s. I’d never noticed that, but I agree. From the shoulders she sways to the waist, then swells again at the booty. Then again down to the legs and feet. Some supermodel said that high heels put the ass on a pedestal, where it belongs—and I agree.
And I used to frequent a McDonald’s that had two young women (twins, actually) who had the most perfect bodies (medically speaking, I imagine, because they were trim and seemed very fit). From the side or from the front, my inner mathematician was okay. As they moved, though, I couldn’t reconcile the 3D model. How could we go from that narrow waist to that full breast or lovely booty from all angles? I couldn’t reconcile it.
If you were going to design something to stand upright, you’d probably have straight legs under it, right? But a woman’s legs start from the outer hip, angling inward at the knee, then back outward.
I wonder if artists who have celebrated the female form were somehow also mathematicians at heart. They realized the woman was circular in the middle to carry a child. The sideways double-S gives her the breasts to nurse and helps her remain erect, while keeping the subcutaneous fat for sitting. Form follows function.
What I know instinctively is that many women are beautiful. I wonder how much of that aesthetic is mathematically driven.
I think it’s pretty well accepted that women are evolutionarily selected for good birthing hips, and have bred more if they have bigger breasts (overall, and especially when men weren’t as “sensitive” as now).
I like the form as well as the next guy, but I think that’s your answer.
Incidentally, even Sports Illustrated has had to seriously ask if the female leg angle is not as adapted to rigorous athletics, especially those using lots of stopping and starting. IIRC, the NCAA knee injury rate is significantly higher on the women’s basketball teams than the men’s.
How you factor in what would seem to be contradictory data like pro tennis, I don’t know.
British artist Wiliam Hogarth wrote (and illustrated) much about the “Line of Beauty”, a gradual S-curve that he saw everywhere (including the female body):
Must we quibble? Can we not enjoy a paean to the loveliness of half the human race?
For my part, I wish to praise the shape of Man. The shoulders, the angle of the neck from the back, the strong hands, the deeper voice, the delicious smell, the erect cock, and the crinkly smile.
Recently, I was doing some research on Wikipedia, feeding the Elephant’s Child. I started by reading about Michelangelo’s David, and then I followed the link to slings. Turns out that the ammunition for slings is called glans (singular) or glanes (plural), which is Latin for “acorn”.
Feh. All these who think that appreciation of geometrical beauty and appreciation of human beauty are incompatible don’t know the history of the European Masters. Art has always been hand in hand with mathematics. Look up the history of perspective sometimes. Or consider the methods behind 3-D modeling and rendering.
Whenever a woman says this, I get the distinct feeling she’s not talking about my shape (and no, I’m not a pear-shaped basement-dwelling netizen), but a Perfect Man. Makes me understand how women feel when men go on about the Perfect Woman.
Me, I like women of a lot of different shapes. I like 'em with legs too short for their trunks, hips too wide for their shoulders. I like 'em a little too soft or hard. I like lantern jaws, thick necks, hobbit toes, ski noses, heavy brows (but please, no more than one or at most two of the last category per woman).
See, I like 'em because they’re women. Beauty transcends geometry.
Yes, indeed. Ask any pregnant woman about backaches and heartburn. The “design” just barely works. It’s a kludge, a bunch of add-ons and patches.
Know why we get sinus headaches? Because we have the drainage ports from our sinuses where they’d work if we still walked on all fours a good deal of the time.
I have nothing to add to the geometry of the female form. However, I was watching Serena Williams earlier and thinking that she is most likely the epitome of your theory.
Except when you bring them together. I tell ya, you bring Zachmanoglou’s Introduction to Partial Differential Equations with Applications to a first date and ask her if she’d like to solve a few hyperbolic vibrating membrane problems by separation of characteristics, and she gets all huffy and walks out. Baby, was it something I said?
