On Beauty and Numbers

In an article for the Washington Post, David Von Drehle asserts that beauty might not really be in the eyes of the beholder, but more likely, it is something biologically hardwired in humans. There's something called The Golden Mean, a ratio of 1 is to 1.618 inches, or phi--that provides symmetry that is necessary to achieve beauty. This symmetry can be observed on Leonardo Da Vinci's sketch of a man with limbs extended, Michelangelo's David, the bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti, in the architecture of human DNA, or even in those supermodels who grace the covers of magazines hawking beauty products. What's interesting is that beauty is somehow a mathematical progression, something actually quantifiable, when through the ages we've always believed that it is based on perception.