Geometry is a Reflection of Life

Monday, November 3, 2008

Final Project

There are lots of interesting things about the number five lots of people don't seem to know about, so for my final project my goal is to make an animation that clearly explains how this happy number relates to the golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers. Many plants, flowers, galaxies, tornados, and even your human body's proportions approximate the golden ratio, a ratio approximately 1:1.618 that is found in every connecting line of a regular pentagon (which is five or phi ve evenly spaced points around a circle). The Greek term for 1.618 is Phi, connecting the word we use for the number 5. There are many ways to algebraically create Phi, one i think to be most interesting is 1+1/1+1/1 +1/1 + 1/1... The longer you continue the equation the closer you approximate the number, which like Pi (3.14...) is a never-ending non-repeating decimal.
What seems to make this make sense is that a pentagon is naturally a fractal- it continually manifest itself inside itself for infinity. The shapes in nature that approximate these proportions make fractal patterns, most notably lightening, river systems, retina,, broccoli, cauliflower veins in leaves, and the overall pattern of branch splitting in trees and spiral patterns, like snail shells, ram's horns, tornados, hurricanes, galaxies, sunflowers, pineapples, red cabbage, and the cream for those very first couple of seconds when you drop it in your coffee.

The first part of the animation will explain what the golden ratio is and how it relates to the number 5 and fibonocci numbers. It will use still pictures animated in after effects and probably a lot of 3d cameras in a kind of omnipresent white space. The second part will utilize these shapes to create transitions between the places nature uses them. It will be sort of like the sunflower and the fly in my rotoscope, but instead of using two objects the transition will just keep on going.