Courtney writes:
So, φ, the golden ratio (an honest to goodness irrational number that's equal to 1.618...) appears all over the place and is considered to be the particular ratio associated with beauty. It comes up in discussions about architecture, the spiral on seashells, and the path a hawk in flight takes as it swoops to catch its prey (the vegan in me doesn't like to contemplate that last one).
It's often written as (1+ squareroot(5))/2, but that's not the only way it can be written. Mathematically, it's algebraic, which means it can be written as a continued fraction:
1+1/(1+1/(1+1/(...)))
So in my tattoo, if you start reading at one of the "1+1" parts, you actually read it as "one plus one over one plus one over one plus one over..." -- exactly the infinite fraction!
There's some cool stuff about the golden ratio on wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio (starts off with ...
