The importance of the golden ratio comes from a Pythagorean discovery that is now barely remembered. In modern schools, children learn of Pythagoras for his famed theorem: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. However, this was in fact ancient news. It was known more than 1,000 years before Pythagoras’s time. In ancient Greece, Pythagoras was remembered for a different invention: the musical scale.
