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Comment by mkl | Hacker News Reader

> he unfolds the significance of the Golden Ratio, showcasing its spiritual depth and presence within the natural order.

Yikes. The golden ratio has limited significance, nothing to do with spirituality, and little presence in nature [1]. Araujo's pictures look great, but in almost any of them you could replace the golden ratio with 1.6, 1.7, or 1.5, and get something no less beautiful.

The Wikipedia page is fairly good on this, especially the "Disputed observations" section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio#Disputed_observat...

As a mathematician, fetishisation of the golden ratio bugs me.

[1] The main place is spiral arrangements of leaves, petals, etc. Vi Hart explains why (watch all three parts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahXIMUkSXX0

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I'm also a mathematician, and it doesn't bug me at all.

> nothing to do with spirituality

It clearly does have a lot to do with spirituality, for many people, as symbol. Much as the cross does for Christans. Neither of these symbols have spiritual meaning to me - a cross is just a cross, a spiral is just a spiral. I don't have much need for spiritual symbolism myself - when I meditate, I rather to focus on a simple sound or light source - but I'd consider it highly egotistical of myself if I was to start judging other people's use of symbols just because they don't understand maths, or whatever.

> fetishisation

I've yet to ever see this word used except to denigrate other people's beliefs, or as an attempt to make the user feel superior. I believe you did both here.

My advice, one mathematician to another: chill and let people have their symbols. Don't expect them to have a deep understanding of mathematics, much as we don't have a deep understanding of their need for spiritual symbolism. Nonetheless we can let each other be, and all get along.

Who knows, perhaps a fascination with this "sacred geometry" as they call it, might be a starting point for someone to have a genuine interest in mathematics.

In my experience, sacred geometry, and all these other terms like frequencies and energies and what not create highly ambiguous language. Esoteric concepts piggy-backing on physics’ success (or mathematics), trying to legitimize nonsense. Manganese-balancing rose quartz. Nuclear vibrations. Quantum uncertainties with at best questionable claims about determinism.

The only people I’ve ever seen healthily walk the boundaries were from philosophy/physics/math to spirituality (whatever that means for individuals), not the other way round.

> highly ambiguous language

So basically, the same as all human language then?

If you're saying that geometric terms should only be allowed to be used in a strictly defined mathematical sense, even by non mathematicians, that's a kind of gatekeeping that doesn't make any logical sense to me.

Firstly, it completely misunderstands how humans use language, how we play with it, make puns, reuse terms from other social groupings (maths) in new ways that have meaning to another social group (new age spirituality), how we bend and twist the meanings of words over time.

Secondly, it's impossible, and unwarranted, to try and police this, so I hope you're good at dealing with being ignored.

> As a mathematician, fetishisation of the golden ratio bugs me.

I know, but hear me out: it's a decent hook for teaching people about Geometry, Recursion, and Dynamic Programming.

Araujo seems to relate the golden ratio to the icosahedron, so I wonder if there is something to that??

(Or is it just that the largest rectangle that inscribes a regular hexagon has the same ratio?)

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