I found this incredible film by Cristobal Vila (via Eterea Studios) at Cocktail Party Physics. There’s also a terrific list featuring some of Jennifer’s favorite math books for popular audiences so go visit!
-
Your Blogger
Chris Mooney is host of the Point of Inquiry podcast and the author of three books, The Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America. He was recently seen on MSNBC's "The Last Word" discussing "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science," and recently wrote for The American Prospect magazine about how the reality-based community is moving to the left.
For more info see Chris's bio and events. You can friend Chris on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter. You can also stream Point of Inquiry, or subscribe via iTunes.
RSS feed for The IntersectionMy Books
Copyright © 2012, Kalmbach Publishing Co.
Privacy - Terms - Reader Services - Subscribe Today - Advertise - About Us
March 29th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
Very nice film!
FYI I first fell in love with the golden ratio and its connection to natural forms at an early age when I saw the Disney short Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land (the lead-in from pentagram segment ratios starts at 1:20. Towards the end, there’s a nice series of comparisons with conch and nautilus shells, compound eyes, and conifer branching.)
I wonder how it is that so many diverse biological structures in so many different species, phyla etc. end up following the same developmental rules….
March 30th, 2010 at 6:24 am
now for a film illustrating that primes lie mainly in the planes..
April 1st, 2010 at 9:49 pm
great flick.
I taught high school geometry for a while and used to devote some time to the golden section and its occurrence in nature.
Some of the claims you read about the golden section in popular books are just hype, of course, but the golden section (and related stuff like the logarithmic spiral and Fibonacci sequence) shows up in nature in enough (and in unexpected places) to make it clear that there is much more going on than meets the eye.
Two of my all time favorite books on the relationship of mathematics to the forms found in nature are “On Growth and Form” (by D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson) and “The Curves of Life” (by Theodore Cook).
They are “old” books (one was written in 1914 and the other in 1917), but are two of the best — and most beautiful — I have come across.