How I met PHI?

The story begins somewhere in 2018, when I took some time off from my medical books to indulge into a good novel. Reading a good book always gave me peace of mind yet tickled my curiosity about so many things, I guess I saw the world through different timelines between those pages, and I loved it! So back to 2018, I picked up Dan Brown’s Da Vinci code, a thriller mystery, and somewhere in the middle of the book I stumbled upon the Greek alphabet PHI, denoted as , whose numerical value is 1.618 and is popularly known as the Golden ratio, the golden mean or the divine proportion. My curiosity was resting on the edge only to discover how truly beautiful PHI is! It is mesmerizing to find it everywhere around you, within you and beyond you. PHI holds wild significance not just in art, architecture, mathematics but even in human body.

Phi was derived from Fibonacci sequence- a progression famous not only because the sum of adjacent terms equaled the next term, but because the quotients of adjacent terms possessed the astonishing property of approaching the number 1.618 – PHI! Despite its seemingly mystical mathematical origin, what really makes it mind boggling is its role as a fundamental building block in nature. Plants, animals, and even human beings all possessed dimensional properties that adhered with eerie exactitude to the ratio of PHI to 1. The arrangement of petals of the flower or the spirals in the sunflower, follow the Fibonacci sequence. The female bee population outnumber the male bee population and if you divide the female bee population to the male bee population, one will arrive at PHI. The ratio of a cephalopod mollusk (snail) each outer spiral of the shell’s diameter to its inner spiral diameter is PHI. The ratio in which leaves arrange themselves is PHI.

When one talks about art and PHI, the first name comes to mind is Leonardo Da Vinci, The Mona Lisa, The Vitruvian Man. Nobody understood better than Da Vinci the divine structure of the human body. Da Vinci exhumed corpses to measure the exact proportions of human bone structure. He was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal PHI.

“Yes, PHI,” Langdon replied. “One point six one eight. Want another example? Measure the distance from your shoulder to your fingertips, and then divide it by the distance from your elbow to your fingertips. PHI again. Another? Hip to floor divided by knee to floor. PHI again. Finger joints. Toes. Spinal divisions. PHI. PHI. PHI. My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion.”
-Da Vinci code, Chapter 20.

Artwork by Michelangelo, Albrecht Dьrer; in magnificent architecture like the Pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal, the Greek Parthenon what has been used is the Golden Ratio. PHI is there in sacred geometry- be it the Sri-yantra or the Pentacle, symbol of Goddess

In facial aesthetics, a face that lies as near to this ratio is considered very attractive. The examples of faces in near the golden ratio are Bella Hadid, Amber Heard. It is the Phi brows to Phi lips or the OG curve or Nike logo (Which btw is an example of golden ratio) that makes the face look SNATCHED!
Phi brings harmony to everything. It establishes balance and beauty and is considered simple yet attractive to look at.

From the apple I eat every day to the apple logo on my phone and the apple on my cheek, I met PHI. With us, I hope one day you too would say – I MET PHI.

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