Real Life Geometry

For Extra Credit, you may post your answers to my blog question. Please remember that anyone can read your statement(s), so please take your time, think about your audience, and what you are going to post BEFORE you publish. DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR LAST NAME! I recommend this as the best way to post - "John K. per 2" Please make sure you QUOTE and CITE all your references. You cannot take someone else's work and call it your own. That would be Plagiarism.

How is Geometry applied in real-world situations? Be SPECIFIC, meaning choose an area of focus such as arts, sports, architecture, etc... and go into depth on that subject. You may also include a real world problem that uses Geometry. Your response should be at least three paragraphs long. Please respond to at least one other student. It should be at least one paragraph long and be a well thought out response. I am looking that you took time to read up on your subject and formulate your thoughts into good creative writing. You can bring your on opinions into your post. In fact, that might be good, because opinions give the opportunity for others to respond to your post.

I have included a sample response:

Geometry in Nature

Nature speaks of Geometry with its patterns and shapes - from the smallest atom to a daisy or a spider’s web. Have you ever dropped a pebble into a still pond? How does the water move? What shape is formed? Have you ever observed the shape of an orange - only to slice it open and notice a new pattern is formed by many triangles?

When I googled Nature in Geometry, it seems the term Sacred Geometry kept coming up. My understanding is that it could be a spirituality/philosophy/religion, talking about the cosmos and creation in various cultures. It seems that Sacred Geometry could also be considered the science of nature. However, some have distorted Sacred Geometry and reduced it to spirit channeling. There were even a few schools of Sacred Geometry. According to one website, Sacred Geometry is “an ancient science that explores and explains the energy patterns that create and unify all things, and reveals the precise way that the energy of Creation organizes itself. On every scale, every natural pattern of growth or movement conforms inevitably to one or more of these geometric shapes.”

Although I am uncertain about the spiritual aspect of Sacred Geometry, I did think there were some interesting things that were brought up. According to Sacred Geometry, nature seems to use a certain and exact set of numbers and proportions over and over. What was particularly interesting to me was phi (or the Golden Ratio). Phi seems to show up not only in nature, but also in art and architecture. Phi is an irrational number which is approximately 1.618… Phi can be seen in the growth of a plant. A stem grows and sprouts a leaf, grows and sprouts another leaf, grows and sprouts another leaf. The stem is growing in a spiral direction, meaning if we were to connect the tips of the leaf it would form a spiral. In an overwhelming majority of plants, it seems the angle of growth from one leaf to another is about 137.5 degrees, which is really 1 over phi to second power times 360 degrees. To me this is extremely fascinating that even nature seems to follow a set of mathematical rules.


http://www.unitone.org/naturesword/sacred%5Fgeometry/general%5Fintroduction/

http://www.sacred-geometry.com/

http://www.luckymojo.com/sacreddefined.html