Our Mission – Educate, Apply and Excel:
This site exists to help you appreciate the incredible beauty and design in the world around you and to excel in whatever you do by applying these same principles of design to your own creative works. Follow in the thoughts of many great minds before you, from ancient civilizations to the Renaissance to the best of class in all areas of today’s arts and design.
We’re dedicated to providing you with the best information and tools on this Golden Number, known as Phi, the Golden Ratio, Golden Section, Golden Proportion, Golden Mean or the Divine Proportion, and its mathematical cousin the Fibonacci Sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 …)
Our goal is to present a broad sampling of phi-related topics in a visually engaging and easy-to-understand format, to provide an online community in which new findings about Phi can be shared and discussed and to offer tools and services (see the right side bar) to aid in your understanding and application of phi and the golden ratio in your work, passions or hobbies.
Share your thoughts with others on the Discussion and Comments page or on any of the posts on specific topics listed above or to the right.
About the Author:
For those of you wondering who created this site and why, here’s a little background information.
The inspiration for the site was a deepening awareness and appreciation of the beauty and design in life. The more I explored, the more I discovered that the number called Phi, or 1.6180339…, appears as a pervasive constant of design in many aspects of our existence. Those presented on this site are only the beginning, and I’d like to thank all the contributors who have provided content to the site.
Could some appearances of phi be just natural? Certainly. Even then, we should still ask how the physical laws of the universe that we consider “natural” are so precisely tuned to support life, should we not? Could the pervasive appearance of Phi instead be evidence of a broader plan of design? That’s something we must each study, experience, ponder and decide for ourselves.
This site is not connected with any scientific, religious or research organization. My credentials for this topic are varied, which has been an asset in this work since the applications of the golden ratio are also quite varied. I have a lifelong love of math, science and nature. Personality tests show me to be the analytic, architect and inventor profile. As a teen, I built a telescope, used it to observe all the Messier objects, founded the astronomy club at my high school and participated in astronomical studies with the Argonne National Laboratory Astronomy Club. In college, I took upper level courses in mathematics, statistics and chemistry before shifting my focus to business to earn a CPA and BS in Accountancy from the University of Illinois, the top school in the country at that time. I earned an MBA in Finance and Marketing from another leading business school, the University of Chicago, and pursued a successful business career. I began in “Big 8” public accounting and later served in Chief Financial Officer and Chief Information Officer roles with operating units of six Fortune 1000 companies and one private equity-backed technology company. In all, I demonstrated a passion for analytics and creative problem solving, and led as an innovator in leveraging technology for strategic and operational advantage. I’ve studied music, play several instruments and write songs. As an technologist and entrepreneur, I’ve been creating websites since 1997 and learned objective-oriented programming for the express purpose of developing PhiMatrix, my golden ratio design and analysis application. It has since sold to thousands of very supportive customers in over seventy countries. Though this site, I’ve done independent research and writing on Phi, the Fibonacci series and related topics. I’ve also had the opportunity to correspond with thousands of people around the world on many varied aspects of this topic. I have had the pleasure of helping them, including their contributions on the site and forming friendships with many of them. Perhaps someday I’ll get that Doctorate of ‘Phi’losophy to add to my foundations to research, write and contribute to this work.
The overriding goal of the site is simply to share phi, and the experience of seeing the mathematics of design and beauty that appears all around us and within us, and to ponder more deeply the meanings to be found in that. I hope this site takes you beyond interest to insight and inspiration, and that through it you come to seek your own answers as to life’s origins and purpose. You can find other sites I’ve developed with the similar goals in mind at PhiMatrix and Snapshots of God.
Gary B. Meisner, MBA
aka “The Phi Guy”
Author/Editor, Phi 1.618: The Golden Number
Developer of “The Golden Ruler™” and “The Golden Grid™.”
Developer, PhiMatrix Golden Ratio Design and Analysis Software