“Hold on,” said a young woman in the front row. Early scientists heralded one-point-six-one-eight as the Divine Proportion.” “PHI’s ubiquity in nature,” Langdon said, killing the lights, “clearly exceeds coincidence, and so the ancients assumed the number PHI must have been preordained by the Creator of the universe. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1.
The laughter abruptly stopped, and Stettner gloated.Īs Langdon loaded his slide projector, he explained that the number PHI was derived from the Fibonacci sequence-a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618-PHI!ĭespite PHI’s seemingly mystical mathematical origins, Langdon explained, the truly mind-boggling aspect of PHI was its role as a fundamental building block in nature. PHI is generally considered the most beautiful number in the universe.” “Actually,” Langdon said, “Stettner’s right again. “This number PHI,” Langdon continued, “one-point-six-one-eight, is a very important number in art. Langdon laughed, but nobody else seemed to get the joke. “As we mathematicians like to say: PHI is one H of a lot cooler than PI!” “Not to be confused with PI,” Stettner added, grinning. “That’s the number PHI.” He pronounced it fee. “Who can tell me what this number is?”Ī long-legged math major in back raised his hand.
Langdon turned to face his sea of eager students. He felt himself suddenly reeling back to Harvard, standing in front of his “Symbolism in Art” class, writing his favorite number on the chalkboard. Instead of researching through books, wading through loads of websites and Wikipedia and compiling into an interesting article, I think, this excerpt from “The Da Vinci Code‘ by Dan Brown encapsulates my thoughts in a much better way.Īfter all, Robert Langdon is a much better professor than I am. It’s a question that is going to arise in everyone’s mind.
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