Here at the Daily Dot, we swap GIF images with each other every morning. Now we’re looping you in. In the Morning GIF, we feature a popular—or just plain cool—GIF we found on Reddit, Canvas, or elsewhere on the Internet.
If Leonardo da Vinci had a Tumblr, this is what he’d reblog.
Based on this GIF, Purchase College student Andrew Russell seems to be the kind of student to bring a fond tear to his profs’ eyes; he doesn’t just learn things, he becomes fascinated by them, creates GIFs to explain them, and then blogs about how much he loves this new nugget of knowledge, to wide acclaim.
We have to admit, Fibonacci sequences are intrinsically cool, and so is the aesthetic principle of the Golden Ratio. Why they coincide so often in nature is one of the great mysteries of mathematics/physics/biology, and it’s not strange that something that fascinated the great da Vinci would prove mesmerizing to a contemporary open mind.
As Russell explains:
the ratio between the size of one digit of one of your fingers and the next digit of the same finger is roughly Φ, the golden ratio. Their lengths line up in an approximate way with sequential fibonacci numbers, because as the fibonacci sequence progresses the ratio between sequential numbers approaches Φ.
but the real cool part is that because of this, when you curl and uncurl your fingers, the path described by a fingertip is pretty close to a perfect golden spiral! what sweetly built machines we pilot over the earth
If that prof doesn’t give him an A, the principles of beauty and truth, i.e., aesthetics and logic, are missing their old friend justice. And 4,519 Tumblr notes agree with us.
