I’m always drawn to locked threads to see what shennanigans I might’ve missed 'cos of timezones or no internet connection. Looking at the last one, I get the impression it was locked because Dale copied a copyright lyric by quoting it, but I can’t be certain…some other posts might’ve been deleted before the wheels were clamped.
So I blame Dale. And the RIAA (the weasels).
I think it would be very helpful, especially for the noobs, if you could mention what your history and experience is, since it’s not always obvious from the post-count and joining date. Well actually in this case I suppose it is. Never mind.
I wouldn’t worry too much about it Loren. Short of deleting the entire thread, really the only way of letting it fade into history was locking it off, and it does need to fade into history.
Well Doug Pi is a bit tricky, a quick google shows no graphical version at all, hardly surprising on thinking a bit, but Tokyo university will let you download 50 million digits of it!
However Phi is related to the golden section so any artist worth his salt would know of it. Here’s my favourite image of it.
This is the curve that describes the shape of breakers in the sea, the arc of a thrown ball, a snails shell and most importantly the vortices of air curling off your flute. http://goldennumber.net/music.htm
These Greek letters are getting me all mixed up, and I am too lazy to look up the proper Greek symbols. The number written above is pi, the 16th letter of the Greek alphabet. The Greek symbol for pi is used to denote the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.
The Greek letter for the Golden Section should be tau and not phi. Like pi, tau is also an irrational number (1.61803…). Revision: I see from looking at the website given by Treeshark that they use phi for the Golden Section. Kind of confusing to me.
From “The Seven Mysteries of Life” by Guy Murchie, page 337:
"There is also a particularly mystic and irrational number or ratio known to matematicians and architects as the Golden Section and sometimes represented by the Greek Letter tau, which could, for aught I know, signify Tree or Topology or Tao. Certainly it is one of the world’s magically beautiful relations that directly affliates protozoa and trees with geometry. Heaven only know where it ends, or if.
I might define tau by saying that it is the ratio between two incommensurable quantities of which the lesser is to the greater as the greater is to the sum of them both. Or, taking a specific example, tau is the length of the diagonal of a regular pentagon or of the radius of a regular decagon expressed in units equal to any side of either of these equal-sided figures.Such units of course could extend any distsance: an inch, a mile, an angstrom, a light year. It makes no difference, for tau always comes out 1.61803… which is the length of the diagonal or the radius in whatever units we use. Tau, in other words, is the ratio between two lengths (expressed in numbers) in the same way that pi of 3.14159… is the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle.
Like pi, tau is an irrational number because it discriminates distances that lack a common denominator. And so there is no known end to its decimal places and therefore no way it can be expressed exactly, a discovery credited, by the way, to Pythagoras himself and which shocked science in the sixth century B.C."
I’ve never seen it referred to by tau, but then I’ve never heard it called the Golden Section either. I’ve always heard Golden Mean and always phi. Maybe it’s one of those things like sqareroot(-1), which most call i, but engineers call j.
One slightly crazy prof of mine made us do a paper relating the Golden Mean to a Stravinski piece. It required some very creative mathematics and argument. Chomsky would have gagged.