The Golden Ratio

What do sunflowers, Salvador Dali's painting 'Sacrament Of The Last Supper' and the spiral shells of molluscs have in common?

If it is true that beauty is in the proportions, the answer is easy. These very disparate elements share a certain geometrical proportion of ancient origin, commonly known as the 'Golden Ratio', expressed numerically as phi.

In a captivating journey through art and architecture, botany and biology, taking in fractals and psychology on the way, Mario Livio takes us into the heart of this extraordinary number that has captured our imagination for millennia.

For this is also a story of obsession - the phi-fixated individuals who have devoted their lives to discovering its secrets, among them the Pythagoreans who believed that the study of the Golden Ratio would reveal the hand of God; the great astronomer Johannes Kepler, who felt that phi was one of the two greatest treasures of geometry; and the modern day physicists and mathematicians who are discovering ever more remarkable ramifications of this strange, almost mystical number.

'The Golden Ratio' is a tale which begins with the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, continues with the great artists and thinkers of the Renaissance, and takes us right up to such masters of the modern world as Bartok, Le Corbusier and Debussy. It is a story which takes you into the heart of beauty itself.