φ

5 Responses · November 17, 2008

φ2x + φ5x + φ2x + φ8x + φ3x + φ7x + φ5x = 960

What is this? Or, what is phi here? Euler’s totient func­tion? Func­tions which appear to con­sist entirely of vari­ables but result in an inte­ger con­fuse me, and as a corol­lary, inter­est me.

jef(f) · November 23, 2008

I became dan­ger­ously obsessed with design­ing this site around the golden ratio. It’s now a three-column lay­out (with four mar­gins), all of whose widths are are related by phi. Given a 960-pixel total page width, this is the equa­tion I wrote to deter­mine exactly how wide each col­umn and mar­gin should be.

Jay · November 23, 2008

I for­got to men­tion that, for no dis­cernible rea­son, it was also impor­tant to me that all seven of those expo­nents be Fibonacci num­bers. That didn’t yield prac­ti­cal col­umn widths, how­ever, so I had to set­tle in one instance on 7, which I jus­ti­fied as being accept­able because it is a Lucas number.

Jay · November 23, 2008

I for­got how cool you are

katie t. · November 25, 2008

Jay · November 25, 2008

Leave a Comment or Subscribe