Another hobby of mine is “experimental mathematics” – I think I may have mentioned (ages ago) my Prime number hunting server.
Well way back in June 2007 (just before actually) I discovered something that seems to have been overlooked for centuries – The Golden Solid Angle.
Everybody knows the basics, the 1-D Golden Ratio, the 2-D Golden Angle (equal to 2*Pi/Golden Ratio^2) and there it seems to have come to a halt for a few centuries. Why hasn’t anybody (until moi) taken this up one further dimension to form the Golden Solid Angle? Or have they? Nobody has got back to me on this and I’ve not seen it in any book or publication on the subject. So why not?
To find the Golden Solid Angle (in steradians) is pretty straightforward. Draw a sphere of radius r with the total surface area of the sphere being 1 + Golden Ratio. Then the solid angle subtended by the unity area part of the sphere is the Golden Solid Angle which is given by 4*Pi/Golden Ratio^2.
I have just sent this off to Wolfram Mathematica to see if they will publish it. Way back in 2007 I sent it off to the Mathematical Gazette and they answered – “Just because it is a new discovery in mathematics doesn’t make it necessarily publishable” which after a lifetime in science with over 120 refereed research journal publications to my name – was a new one on me.
Let’s see if the Stephen Wolfram outfit are a little more enlightened – or not!
