By Øyvind Hammer
This e-book makes use of the spiral form as a key to a mess of wierd and probably disparate tales approximately artwork, nature, technological know-how, arithmetic, and the human endeavour. In a fashion, the publication is itself geared up as a spiral, with nearly disconnected chapters circling round and shutting in at the universal subject matter. a specific power of the booklet is its super cross-disciplinary nature - every little thing is enjoyable, and every thing is attached! whilst, the writer places nice emphasis on mathematical and clinical correctness, against this, probably, with a few prior books on spirals. matters contain the mathematical homes of spirals, sea shells, sunlight plants, Greek structure, air ships, the background of arithmetic, spiral galaxies, the anatomy of the human hand, the paintings of prehistoric Europe, Alfred Hitchcock, and spider webs, to call a few.
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Additional info for The Perfect Shape: Spiral Stories
Sample text
Handguns and rifles commonly use a quadruple or sixfold helix (Fig. 3). After firing, the bullet expands inside the barrel, and the helical grooves of the rifling cut (“engrave”) into it. This forces the bullet into a rapid spin which stabilizes it like a gyroscope, making it easier to hit your target. Most spirals in this book are Good. The spirals of the rifle are Evil. If you bend a helix around into a circle, and connect the two ends together, you produce a continuous, beautiful structure called a toroidal helix.
It has two options. It can twist the head to the side, but this increases aerodynamic drag. Or it can fly in such a way that the prey is always 40 to the side of the tangent of the line of motion, producing a logarithmic spiral path just like the moth © Springer International Publishing AG 2016 Ø. 1007/978-3-319-47373-4_10 39 40 The Perfect Shape Fig. 1 Flight by transverse orientation. Top: Light source far away (natural condition). Bottom: Light source at short distance. All angles indicated are equal 40˚ 40˚ Fig.
5). Such shape change through growth, so-called allometry, is in fact very common in ammonite and snail shells. 28 The Perfect Shape Fig. 5 Three attempts at specifying radial and left–right growth rates as a function of position around the growing edge of an ammonite. All three simulations start with a circular cross section of the aperture. Adapted from Hammer and Bucher (2005) 8 The King of Snails Which way do snails coil? By convention, if you place a spiral shell with the tip (apex) up and the opening facing you, a right-handed or dextral shell has the opening to the right.