Adolf Zeising

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Adolf Zeising was a German psychologist, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy.

Among his discoveries, Adolf found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law.[1] Zeising wrote in 1854:[citation needed]

[The Golden Ratio is a universal law] in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.

[2]

Many of his studies were followed by Gustav Fechner[citation needed], and Le Corbusier, who elaborated his studies of human proportion to develop the Modulor.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Ibid. Padovan, R. Proportion: Science, Philosophy, Architecture , pp. 305-06
  2. ^ Zeising, Adolf, Neue Lehre van den Proportionen des meschlischen Körpers, Leipzig, 1854, preface.