[Datagenerator]

The chord through the midpoints of two sides of an inscribed equilateral triangle cuts a diameter in the golden ratio. This interesting method gives a purely geometric construction of positive Phi without using Fibonacci numbers.

[thaumasiotes]

> This interesting method gives a purely geometric construction of positive Phi without using Fibonacci numbers.

There's nothing particularly interesting about that; phi is (1 + √5)/2. All numbers composed of integers, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square roots can be constructed by compass and straightedge.

[yababa_y]

I was somewhat surprised to learn that phi is _merely_ (1 + √5)/2, I didn't have a good conception of what it was at all but I didn't think it was algebraic.

[thaumasiotes]

Phi is conceptually defined like so:

    Suppose you have a rectangle whose side length ratio is ϕ. You draw a line across the rectangle which divides it into a square and another rectangle.

    Then the side length ratio of the new, smaller rectangle is also ϕ.

The diagram is straightforward to set up:

       a        b
    +-----+--------+
    |     |        |
    |  ϕa-|        |
    |     |        |-b
    |     |        |
    +-----+--------+
     \            /
      -----  -----
           \/
           ϕb

This gives us a system of two equations:

    ϕa = b
    ϕb = a + b

If you substitute b = φa into the other one, you get

    ϕ(ϕa) = a + ϕa

And since a is just an arbitrary scaling factor, we have no problem dividing it out:

    ϕ² = 1 + ϕ

Since we defined φ by reference to the length of a line, we know that it is the positive solution to this equation and not the negative solution.

(Side note: there are two styles of lowercase phi, fancy φ and plain ϕ. They have their own Unicode points.

HN's text input panel displays ϕ as fancy and φ as plain. This is reversed in ordinary text display (a published comment, as opposed to a comment you are currently composing). And it's reversed again in the monospace formatting. (Which matches the input display.)

The ordinary text display appears to be incorrect, going by the third usage note at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%95 )

[anigbrowl]

HN's text input panel displays ϕ as fancy and φ as plain. This is reversed in ordinary text display (a published comment, as opposed to a comment you are currently composing). And it's reversed again in the monospace formatting. (Which matches the input display.)

I'm glad you posted this. I'm not a unicode expert and have always assumed these weird dichotomies were some sort of user/configuration error on my part. Realizing the unicode glitches are actaully at the website end instead of between my ears is quite a relief.

[thaumasiotes]

To be more specific, that usage note strongly suggests that the problem is in the font used by HN. The font is what complies or doesn't comply with the Unicode standard. We can also say that HN has a problem, but HN's problem is "they're using a noncompliant font for monospaced text".

(On further investigation, I got the characters backwards, and HN's ordinary display is correct while the monospaced display isn't.)