JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

“And it was then that all these kinds of things thus established received their shapes from the Ordering One, through the action of Ideas and Numbers.”[Plato, Timaeus ]

Just a quick comment here about Matila Ghyka’s The Geometry of Art and Life, published by Sheed and Ward in 1946.  It is a beautifully-designed book, skinny even though it is 176pp (not long not short), and well and interestingly illustrated.  It addresses math and art, or math in art, finding recurrent spatial proportions there, and in music, with the maths being at the center of the creative and imaginative process.  The author goes further and dips into these themes in life/biology (that’s the “Geometry of Life” part), where he trods in familiar antique and old grounds of the Golden Section of logarithmic spirals, and then finds himself in a very interesting position in  chapter VII’s “The Transmission of Geometrical Symbols and Plans”. I’m not so sure that I like the book as a complete work, but the parts make for some very good reading.