Coloring Book Celebrates Mathematical Beauty of Nature with Hand-Drawn Golden Ratio Illustrations

By Kristine Mitchell on April 1, 2016 Rafael Araujo’s hand-drawn Golden Ratio illustrations are a beautiful fusion of art with science. For the past 40 years, the Venezuelan architect and illustrator has been perfecting his amazing drawings that are all connected by this common theme. Armed with nothing but a pencil, compass, ruler, and protractor he creates drawings that depict the mathematical brilliance of the natural world, and has recently begun to compile renditions of his best work into an adult coloring book that seeks to reconnect humans with nature. Araujo’s illustrations revolve around intelligent patterns of growth that are ruled by the Golden Ratio. This special number, commonly annotated with the Greek letter Phi (?), is equal to 1.618 and can be seen in all sorts of natural spirals, sequences, and proportions. “Phyllotaxis” is the name given for the tendency of organic things to grow in spiral patterns and…

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Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study

Original Post: www.theguardian.com Dating from 1,000 years before Pythagoras’s theorem, the Babylonian clay tablet is a trigonometric table more accurate than any today, say researchers Mathematician Dr Daniel Mansfield with the Plimpton 322 tablet. Photograph: UNSW/Andrew Kelly Shares 46,456 Comments 1,329 Maev Kennedy Thursday 24 August 2017 14.00 EDT Last modified on Thursday 24 August 2017 17.00 EDT At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today. The 3,700-year-old broken clay tablet survives in the collections of Columbia University, and scientists now believe they have cracked its…

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