Are humans conditioned to perceive some concrete patterns as beautiful? The mathematician Fibonacci proposed the Fibonacci sequence in 1202, but cultures have used this idea of a “golden ratio” as early as 300BC. To avoid going into too much detail, the Fibonacci sequence details an outward spiral of numbers, where each number corresponds to the side length of a square that gets larger and larger. It is often seen as a seashell shape.
Whether purposefully or incidentally, artists have been using this spiral for a very long time, ranging from architecture to paintings. It brings up the question – what is it about this spiral that makes it so visually appealing to us? Perhaps it has something to do with our love for order and symmetry, for finding order within chaos. It’s also a helpful reminder that art, nature, and math are all connected and, in many ways, our purpose for exploring each of those things end up being the same – to understand the world around us.
