

The results showed a preference for the golden rectangle, as the following results show:Īs for the presence of the golden section in nature, many examples are already known: sunflowers, pine cones, shells, arrangement of leaves around a flower stalk, or petals distributed in 5 points… Form golden spirals, logarithmic spirals formed from the golden section. To test his hypothesis that the golden rectangle, here f=1.62, would naturally be preferred by his panel (which was composed of people of both sexes, chosen without discriminating factors), he asked each person to choose a most popular rectangle, then a least popular rectangle. He presented his subjects with 10 white rectangles on a black background, ranging in size from f=1 to f=2.5, each of equal area. It was in order to assess the aesthetic qualities of the Golden Rectangle by facts that Gustav Fechner, a German psychologist, conducted tests in 1874. Popularity of the golden rectangleĮven if the aesthetic qualities of the golden rectangle seem to be unanimously agreed upon, let’s keep in mind that it is questionable. The expression “golden section” is a legacy of Leonardo da Vinci, who used the expression “sectio aurea” (golden section) to refer to what Luca Pacioli called divine proportion, or Kepler’s “jewel of geometry”. The major contributions to mathematical research on the golden section are those of Euclid, Thales and Pythagoras, but it is undoubtedly to Fibonacci that we owe the most significant advances with his Liber Abaci, a work in which we discover the famous Fibonacci sequence, an arithmetic sequence in which the ratio of one figure to the previous one is equal to ɸ:Ġ, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987

The discovery of the golden section dates back to antiquity and its definition has been enriched over the centuries, including the Middle Ages.
