Following the ultimate goal to understand life, the concepts of the chaos and the cosmos have been a mind stretching entertainment for philosophers and thinkers ever since the Antiquity. Mathematicians have spent, and still do, endless hours over the fascinating precision in the arrangement of pretty much everything that surrounds us.
That somewhat mysterious order crystallised in the concept of the so called Golden ratio or Divine proportion. “Two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities”. There is a mathematical equation that calculates the Golden ratio to be 1.618 and it is usually represented by the Greek letter phi “Φ“ after the Greek sculptor Phidias, who is known to be the first to incorporate the Golden ratio in the statues of the Parthenon circa 450BC.
The Divine proportion has been a subject of not only mathematics, but also art, architecture, music, even literature, mostly because it is considered that this proportion is visually and aesthetically appealing. There are many works of art organised according to the Golden ratio.
In the English language, the word ratio, with the meaning of “reason” is a borrowing from Latin. The classic Latin word denoting: “reckoning, reasoning, calculation, procedure”, along with “judgement and understanding”, similar in its meaning to the Greek word “logos”. Ratio stemmed from the Latin root reri – “to reckon, to calculate, to think”.
The first written record coming from an English source dates to 1538, when the word ratio was used in the sense of a logical reasoning by Sir Philip Sidney in An apologie for poetrie.
In the sense of a mathematical ratio (the relationship between two numbers), for the first time, the word was mentioned in 1660, by Isaac Barrow in his translation of Euclid’s Elements (c. 300BC), in which Euclid gives the first definition of the Golden ratio: “Ratio (or rate) is the mutual habitude or respect of two magnitudes of the same kind each to other, according to quantity.”
And when comes to finances, where the Golden ratio is synonymous to the Golden Standard, the ratio in which one metal stands to another in respect of their value, the first record comes from 1711, from Lloyd’s Theory of Money: “Where various metals are current, the prince could not fix the quantity of taxes without settling at the same time the ratio between such metals, whether he receives them by weight, or by nominal quantities .”
