Beyond Measure

This book consists of essays that stand on their own but are also loosely connected. Part I documents how numbers and geometry arise in several cultural contexts and in nature: the ancient musical scale, proportion in architecture, ancient geometry, megalithic stone circles, the hidden pavements of the Laurentian library, the shapes of the Hebrew letters, and the shapes of biological forms. The focus is on how certain numbers, such as the golden and silver means, present themselves within these systems. Part II shows how many of the same numbers and number sequences are related to the modern mathematical study of numbers, dynamical systems, chaos, and fractals.