Michael Trieu Golden Ratio Phase 1 03/11/12 Statistics 1510 Professor Brian Jean

Introduction
The Golden Ratio is said to be the blueprint for how everything is made in nature. I will be doing an experiment on the Golden Ratio to prove if its true of false. The Fibonacci sequence is very familiar to the Golden Ratio where the numbers in the sequence have a ratio of 1:1.618 same as the Golden Ratio. Many buildings, cards, cars, etc. are built upon the Golden Ratio. The Golden Ratio is even inside us, our DNA structure is a double helix that has width and height that resembles 1:1.618. The ratio is very unique to us because it could be the ratio of how we are made and structured as humans.

Methods
I will be creating an experiment that puts the Golden Ratio to test. I randomly chose fteen males and fteen females that I came across that included family members, friends, and people that were open to being measure for data. I took measurements of their arms in inches to get the whole size of the arm. After I got the measurements for the arms, I took an additional measurement of the elbow to their nger tips. I used the scale of inches to measure both male and female body parts. Both the measurements of the full arm and elbow to nger tip will tell me the ratio of the human arm in males and females. The formula for getting the ratio for the human arm would be to divide the length of the ngertip to elbow to the length of shoulder to ngertip My hypothesis is that my data will be very similar to the Golden Ratio.

Male Measurements

Female Measurements

Results

The table and graph of the male measurements data gives us very vital information. The mean is about 1.59 which is the average ratio of male arm length in inches. The sample deviation for males is about 0.05, which describes how spread out the data is. In conclusion, on average the difference between each ratio is about 0.05 around the mean. This information is a way of double checking how close we were able to keep the measurements the same, the bigger the sample deviation means there would be more room for variation in the data or results. The lowest or minimum ratio for males came out to be 1.50. The 5 number summary for Male arm ratios describe the set of observations which are also the most important percentiles. The rst quartile which is the same as the 25th percentile measured at a ratio of 1.53. The median or middle spot of the data, which is 50% of the data under and 50% over is at a ratio of 1.59. The

maximum ratio I recorded out of the 15 males came out to be 1.67. It appears to have a uniform shape for the data from the observations of the table and graph.

The average of all the female ratio data resulted in 1.75. The standard deviation of the female ratios is 0.24. The variance is .05 which gives us information of how spread out the data is on average. The minimum or lowest ratio recorded for females is 1.42. The median of the female data is 1.76. The rst quartile or where 25% of the data below and 75% above the data is 1.6. The third quartile or 75th percentile came out to be 1.8. 2.34 is the maximum ratio I recorded for female arm ratios. The data is slightly skewed right from what we see in the female ratio graph and table.

The comparison of both male and female arm ratios can give us information, that we can compare the data side by side. The data tells us that the average male ratio came closer to the Golden Ratio than the females. The males also had a lower standard deviation meaning that there was less variability than females.

Based on my results I did not get very close to the Golden Ratio of 1:1.618. The conclusion of my data is that the Golden Ratio is false. On the other hand, I could of not got the most precise measurements that resulted in a slightly different ratio. Also, I would have wanted to have a much larger sample to experiment on the Golden Ratio.