I recall first seeing Golden Ratio by Mario Livio at a bookstore in high school. I had recently read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (a book about Paul Erdos), by Paul Hoffman, and quite enjoyed it. So when I was given a gift card I found myself at the mathematics section of the bookstore. The books I was looking at included Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB) and Golden Ratio. I cannot recall any other titles I was looking at, nor can I recall what I purchased other than that I did purchase GEB and did not purchase Golden Ratio. Over the next few months I heard good things about GEB and nothing about Golden Ratio, so I assumed I had made a good decision. I'll guess that about a year later I was in a similar position and I was tempted again by Golden Ratio, but decided against it. I didn't encounter Golden Ratio for a number of years after that.
About eight months ago I was at my friend Matt's apartment and I saw he had a copy of Golden Ratio, which he then lent to me upon my asking. I started reading the book slowly. Within a few
weeks another friend was ridding herself of books and gave Rebecca a copy of the book. Rebecca soon passed me and then proceeded to finish reading the book with a couple weeks. I returned my borrowed copy, as I could now borrow Rebecca's.
Last week, I finally finished the book. I'm happy to have finished. The book was aimless and full of tangents. I learned about painters I had not heard of and more about some that I had, but I hardly needed to read pages of material on an artist who did NOT use the golden ratio in his art. I am glad however, to have learned more about Johannes Kepler and how he was a little weird. Also, I learned that it is not a coincidence that 1/89=0.011235..., which I'm quite happy about (note that 89 is a Fibonaci number, as are 1,2,3 and 5).
Blog-off (given as sums of Fibonaci numbers)
Cameron: 21 + 8 + 3 + 1
Neil: 13 + 2
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