the.com/proportion
the silent law making your face beautiful and your bridge stand up.
means The size, amount, or degree of one thing measured in relation to another, or the balanced relationship between parts of a whole.
from From Latin proportio, built from pro- ('for, according to') and portio ('a share, a portion'). So at root it's 'according to each one's share' — the idea that things relate by their measured slice. Roman writers used it to translate the Greek mathematicians' notion of analogia, ratio between quantities, and it slipped into English through Old French in the late Middle Ages, carrying both the cold arithmetic of ratios and the warmer sense of harmony and fit.
- golden ratio
- Roughly 1.618, found in shells, sunflowers, art
- da vinci
- Vitruvian Man maps a body's ideal proportions
- medicine
- Drug doses scale by body weight, not guesswork
- music
- Octaves are strings in exact 2-to-1 length ratio
- sense of size
- Brains judge objects only by relative proportion
golden ratio — mathematical proportion of 1:1.618 found in the parthenon, mona lisa, and nature
rule of thirds — photographic composition dividing frame into 9 equal sections, used by virtually all professional photographers
vitruvian man — leonardo da vinci's 1490 drawing showing ideal human body proportions in a square and circle