Go Geometry Education

Stonehenge builders had geometry skills to rival Pythagoras. Golden Rectangle

Stonehenge satellite image in Google Earth. Successive Golden Rectangles dividing a Golden Rectangle into squares (Stonehenge).

Stonehenge builders had geometry skills to rival Pythagoras

May 26, 2008. Source Independent.co.uk by David Keys

David Keys says:
Stone Age Britons had a sophisticated knowledge of geometry to rival Pythagoras – 2,000 years before the Greek "father of numbers" was born, according to a new study of Stonehenge.

Five years of detailed research, carried out by the Oxford University landscape archaeologist Anthony Johnson, claims that Stonehenge was designed and built using advanced geometry.

Johnson's research, published as a book this week, shows that Stonehenge derived its design from geometrical knowledge and features no less than six concentric polygons..

Read full story at Independent.co.uk

The Golden Rectangle and the Stonehenge

A golden rectangle is a rectangle whose side lengths are in the golden ratio, one-to-phi, that is, approximately 1:1.618. A distinctive feature of this shape is that when a square section is removed, the remainder is another golden rectangle, that is, with the same proportions as the first. Square removal can be repeated infinitely, which leads to an approximation of the golden or Fibonacci spiral.

Fibonacci numbers (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34...) are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci. The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself.

Stonehenge and Golden Rectangle