"K" wrote in message
...
"Rupert (W.Yorkshire)" writes

"K" wrote in message
...
"Rupert (W.Yorkshire)" writes

"K" wrote in message
.. .
Broadback writes
Not being an artistic sort of chap, I can admire well designed gardens
but
lack the vision to design them. I am planning on an island rose bed,
what
would be a pleasing shape, is an oval or oblong with circular short
ends
best? Also what proportion of length to breadth, is 2:1 pleasing to
the
eye?

Shouldn't the Golden Ratio come in here? (Square root of 5) divided by
2
if I remember rightly.

The answer is about 1.6 so summat is wrong. Looked it up (1+sqrt5)/2.
Architect man spent ages wiffling away about this to me last week (at
vast
expense).

Yep. It's the solution to a = 1/(1+a). Keep substituting for a in the
rhs
and you get the 'continued fraction 1/(1+1/(1+1/(1+....))). Of no use to
man nor beast but a pretty mathematical form.

And doesn't the Fibonacci series link into this somehow too?
--
Kay

snip

So what exactly is the link to Fibonacci - is it that the ratio of
successive terms tends to .618?


That's good enough for me and is explained here
http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal...at.html#golden

For those who think we are drifting OT - the Fibonacci series turns up

all over nature. Each term is the sum of the two previous, starting 0 1,
so:
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 35 56 91 ....

and whenever you see a set of spirals - sunflower, that spirally
cauliflower, cacti, fircones - counting the spirals in one direction then
counting the spirals in the direction crossing the first, gives you two
successive terms of the Fibonacci series.



Kay