History of Golden Ratio

Golden Ratio is a term (with an astounding number of aliases) used to describe aesthetically pleasing proportioning within a piece. (There is, in fact, a mathematical formula with which one can calculate Golden Ratio. Please see the links at right for information on such, from those who are less right-brained than your Guide.)

All math aside, some unknown genius figured out (millennium ago) that, in a work of art or architecture, if one maintained a ratio of small elements to larger elements that was the same as the ratio of larger elements to the whole, the end result was extraordinarily pleasing to the eye. This ratio is a common theme in sacred geometry world-wide.

History of Pi

Pi has been known for almost 4000 years—but even if we calculated the number of seconds in those 4000 years and calculated pi to that number of places, we would still only be approximating its actual value. Here’s a brief history of finding pi:
The ancient Babylonians calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius, which gave a value of pi = 3. One Babylonian tablet (ca. 1900–1680 BC) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi, which is a closer approximation.
Rhind Papyrus (ca.1650 BC), there is evidence that the Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by a formula that gave the approximate value of 3.1605 for pi.
The ancient cultures mentioned above found their approximations by measurement. The first calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes approximated the area of a circle by using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the areas of two regular polygons: the polygon inscribed within the circle and the polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. Since the actual area of the circle lies between the areas of the inscribed and circumscribed polygons, the areas of the polygons gave upper and lower bounds for the area of the circle. Archimedes knew that he had not found the value of pi but only an approximation within those limits. In this way, Archimedes showed that pi is between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.

History of Photography

First, the name. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. (*1) The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
Before mentioning the stages that led to the development of photography, there is one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man called de la Roche (1729- 1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky substance. This surface, so the tale goes, would not only provide a mirror image on the sticky canvas, but would remain on it. After it had been dried in the dark the image would remain permanent. The author would not have known how prophetic this tale would be, only a few decades after his death.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible. It is somewhat surprising that photography was not invented earlier than the 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography came into being.
The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence for at least four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated.
The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light.

History of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Course match, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Face mash, where you could rate people's attractiveness.

In February 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.

History of Love Songs

In ancient times, all poetry was sung. The poet is pictured playing a lyre or other instrument. There was no separation of lyrics and melody as we now think of them. Unfortunately none of the melodies for these early love lyrics has survived but it's easy to imagine a softly strummed harp and a husky voice singing the words that have come down to us.

Though they are thousands of years old, the earliest love songs sound so contemporary, so honest, so urgent, they might have been written yesterday. They are proof that human emotions have not changed. When we fall in love today, we feel what men and women felt in centuries past: desire, joy, disappointment, yearning, fulfillment.

So just how far back can we trace love songs? When Pharoah Rameses wanted to tell a beautiful, bronze-skinned Egyptian lady that he found her desirable, did he have a court musician sing something that sounded like "Love Me Tender"? In a way, he did. We have recovered 3500-year-old Egyptian love poems from pieces of papyrus and pottery fragments. They are filled with the language and sentiments we hear in today's pop songs.

History of Colors

Isaac Newton made a study of color starting at the age of 23 in 1666 and developed the useful Newton color circle which gives insight about complementary colors and additive color mixing. He realized that some colors (magenta, purple) could not be produced as spectral colors. One of his contributions was the idea that white light is light containing all wavelengths of the visible spectrum. He demonstrated this fact with experiments on the dispersion of light in glass prisms.
Thomas Young suggested the threefold character of color perception in 1802 and speculated that there were three different types of color sensitive receptors in the eye.
In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell explored the use of three primary colors and realized that no additive combination of three primary colors can cover the entire gamut of perceivable hues. He showed that the set of primaries was not unique, but that spectral primaries more widely separated in wavelength could be used to produce a wider range of perceived hues. He also realized that with some subtraction, the entire gamut of perceived colors could be covered. Maxwell recognized that the chromaticism (hue and saturation) of a colored surface is relatively insensitive to the brightness. Maxwell's work could be considered to be the basis for modern calorimetry.

History of Water

History is, one might say, somewhat waterlogged. Since water is absolutely essential to human life, it should not be surprising that it is an important component of human history. Yet it is surprising how little attention water receives in historical accounts.
Water facilitated relatively rapid transportation prior to about 1850 C.E. In the era of exploration and discovery from the late 15th through the 18th centuries, Europeans explored all the major oceans and seas. Water was also thought to be an essential aspect of imperialism from the 16th century on (this is known the "salt water fallacy," the idea that an empire must be separated from the mother country by an ocean; this is why neither the Russian nor the American continental empires were seen as comparable to the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch empires). The history of exploration and trade remains a major area of historical scholarship dealing with water.
Water was also an important source of power in the period before the Industrial Revolution. Even though steam power made water power less necessary, water remained an essential component in all kinds of manufacturing processes. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, however, water increasingly becomes a hidden factor in human history. For many, it quite literally went underground, hidden from sight until one turned on a faucet or flushed a toilet. Increasing, there was a tendency to view it as something to master and control. This is, of course, in accord with a more general approach to nature as a whole: mastery and control.