Beauty has both puzzled and amazed mankind for the past two millennia. During this period, people have tried countless times to define beauty - to explain it with words.
"Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror" - Kahlil Gaibran.
"Beauty is a perfume without a name" - Arthur D, Ficke.
"Beauty is the souvenir of pain" - Rober Nathan.
These are just some of the countless examples of attempts to explain the unsolvable riddle - "What is beauty?" One characteristic that all of these "definitions" share is that they all fail in defining beauty. The reason they do not accurately explain it, is because all the definitions assume that beauty is a complex thing, and therefore needs to be explained with a complex medium, like language. To solve this question, however, we need not look further than basic mathematics - to an irrational number called "Phi".
It was the Greeks who said, "All beauty is mathematics." They were the first to discover that in almost every object or organism that was considered beautiful, there existed a common relation. This proportion, which is now referred to as the "golden ratio," is the ratio of 1.618:1. Using this ratio, "golden shapes" can be built. For example, a golden rectangle consists of a width to height ratio that is the golden ratio. This relation is also the basis for many other "golden" geometric shapes such as the golden triangle, pentagon and decagon.
Implementation of the golden ratio, its various shapes, and the number Phi, dates back to the Greeks who based their most famous work, the Parthenon, on golden rectangles. Much later, Leonardo da Vinci structured the face of his famous painting, the Mona Lisa, around golden rectangles. Furthermore, some of Mozart's most famous sonatas are divided into two parts, whose length is the golden ratio. In fact, this number is so powerfull that the ancient Greek mathematicians and Pythagoras considered the number Phi to be godly.
