Fibonacci. We’re talking Fibonacci here and I think that it’s pronounced something like - FIB-OH-NAW-CHEE.

Whatever.

Fibonacci was a cool guy. He was born in Italy in 1170 or thereabouts and his name meant “good-for-nothing”. The ugly duckling turned into a beautiful swan, however, because he became the most brilliant mathematician of his day. Along the way, Fibonacci became interested in the reproduction of rabbits, (for some reason), and came up with a sequence of numbers. 1,1,2,3,5,8,13, 21, 34, etc. This sequence represents the number of pairs of rabbits each month starting with the original pair. (Each pair need two months to mature before they can reproduce - that’s why the sequence starts with 1,1.) Notice that the new number in the sequence is found by adding the last two numbers. Big news for mathematicians of the 13^th century. (He didn’t really get to work until the 1200’s.) But the really big news was the ratio between the numbers of the sequence. If you divide 13 by 8 you get 1.625. If you divide 21 by 13 you get 1.6154. As the numbers get larger your answer to the division will center on 1.618.

“Wow!” you say. But the mathematicians of the 13^th century were beside them selves with excitement because that number - 1.618 - is found everywhere in nature. Some of the places it’s found: solar system geometry, study of population growth, structure of plants, structure of sea shells and movement of stock prices … among many other things. You won’t believe this. The proportions of the human face has lots of the 1.618 ratio imbedded in it.

There was a luminary in the field of orthodontics by the name of Robert Ricketts. He did a study where he measured the distance between various points on the faces of “physically beautiful women”. For instance, he measured the distance from the hairline to the bottom of the chin and divided that by the distance from the hairline to the nostril. That equaled 1.618. He divided the distance from the nostril to the bottom of the chin by the distance from the corner of the mouth to the bottom of the chin. That, too, was 1.618. He divided the distance between the temples by the distance between the outside corners of the eyes. That was 1.618, (double WOW!). Anyway, you get the idea. Turns out that it works on “physically beautiful men” also.

Check out: http://www.facialbeauty.org/divineproportion.html

http://www.beautyanalysis.com/index2_mba.htm

http://goldennumber.net/face.htm

http://www.camerahobby.com/Ebook-GoldenRatio_Chapter16.htm

This number, 1.618, is so prevalent in nature that it’s called “The Golden Mean”. Do a Google on “golden mean” and you’ll get 54 million hits.

So - if faces that look good to us are composed of proportions of the golden mean, could we, in fact, measure everyone’s face and come up proportions that indicate a propensity for goodness or certain talents, etc.?

Seems to me that’s exactly what we’re doing when we read faces for personally traits, but more than that, the golden mean shows that we are all face readers - trained or not. It’s just that training will expand your insight - oooooh - maybe a thousand times.