George Clooney, the cauliflower, the cardiologist, and phi, the golden ratio

doi:10.1136/bmj.b4745

From trainee to consultant, BMJ Group offers doctors around the world tailored information, special events, learning resources and recruitment services at every step along their career path.

... by doctors, for doctors, for patients
We are open for entries!

Online learning

BMJ Learning

High-quality CME / CPD for doctors and other healthcare professionals. BMJ Learning features hundreds of accredited, peer-reviewed learning modules in text, video, and audio formats. Find out more

Courses and Qualifications

BMJ Masterclasses

BMJ Masterclasses, led by experts, help clinicians to use the latest evidence and recent guidelines in practice and meet their CPD/CME requirements. Find out more

Exam Preparation

The leading provider of online exam preparation, helping over 167,000 healthcare professionals to pass their exams. Find out more

onExamination

Search all BMJ education articles:

From

Limit by

Access to the full text of this article requires a subscription or payment. Please log in or subscribe below.

Hanno Ulmer, medical statistician12,
Cecily C Kelleher, public health physician3,
Martin W Dünser, intensivist4

¹Department of Medical Statistics, Informatics and Health Economics, Innsbruck Medical University, Schoepfstrasse 41, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria
²Agency for Preventive and Social Medicine, Bregenz, Austria
³School of Public Health and Population Sciences, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
⁴Department of Intensive Care Medicine, Inselspital Bern, Bern, Switzerland

Correspondence to: H Ulmer hanno.ulmer{at}i-med.ac.at

The challenge for scientists of all disciplines is to discern basic patterns and laws of nature that can be described mathematically—all this in a universe generated apparently from chaos and influenced by random events.

The “golden ratio” is one such phenomenon and has been known to mathematicians since ancient times. Two quantities are in the golden ratio when the ratio between their sum and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger one and the smaller. The Italian mathematician Leonardo Pisano, often known as Fibonacci, discovered the sequence (which was named after him) from which phi (Φ), the golden ratio, can …