Adolf zeising biography

Adolf Zeising

Adolf Zeising (24 September 1810 – 27 April 1876) was a German psychologist, whose main interests were mathematics and philosophy.

Among his theories, Zeising claimed to have found the golden ratio expressed in the arrangement of branches along the stems of plants and of veins in leaves. He extended his research to the skeletons of animals and the branchings of their veins and nerves, to the proportions of chemical compounds and the geometry of crystals, even to the use of proportion in artistic endeavors. In these phenomena he saw the golden ratio operating as a universal law,[1]

the universal law in which is contained the ground-principle of all formative striving for beauty and completeness in the realms of both nature and art, and which permeates, as a paramount spiritual ideal, all structures, forms and proportions, whether cosmic or individual, organic or inorganic, acoustic or optical; which finds its fullest realization, however, in the human form.[2]

Many of his studies were followed by Gustav Fechner[3]

New Material Relative to Zeising

The last changes to this page were made on: 2021.03.25

This page has five parts:
I.   Corrections to the Book
II.  Reviews of the Book
III. New References
IV. Items in the Possession of Professor Jochen Heisenberg
V.  Genealogy

I.   Corrections to the Book

N.B. Some corrections appear on the CD that accompanies the the book Adolph Zeising; Click on "additions and corrections" in "TABLE_CONTENTS.html". In the list
italics indicate the corrections to be made.

1.   Page 5: The first sentence of the second paragraphnew_zeising.html should read, "August Zeising, Adolph
Zeising's father is listed on the marriage certificate of Adolph's parents, as well as on Adolph's two birth certificates as being a court musician."

2.   Page 45, paragraph 4. ``In the second interpretation  ...   larger to smaller  ...   which is
larger than 1.

3.   Page 131, footnote 5. Quetelet was a

Adolph Zeising: The Life and Work of a German Intellectual

A great deal of nonsense has been written about the so-called golden ratio,
(1 + &√5)/2,

often called Φ: how it was built into the Great Pyramid, how it determines the prettiest rectangle and where people's navels are situated, and so on. (For anti-nonsense, see George Markowsky's "Misconceptions about the Golden Ratio", College Math. J.23 (1992) #1, 2-19, his review of Mario Livio's The Golden Ratio in Notices of the AMS52 (2005) #3, 344-347, or my Numerology, MAA, 1997, Ch. 29.)

Given the human hunger for marvels, fictitious or otherwise, golden numberism might inevitably have arisen, but the person who got the ball rolling was Adolph Zeising (1810-1876) in an 1854 book whose translated title is An Exposition of a New Theory of the Proportions of the Human Body.

Roger Herz-Fischler, author of A Mathematical History of the Golden Number (1987, Dover reprint, 1998) and The Shape of the Great Pyramid (Wilfrid Laurier U. Press, 2000) decided to find out everything he could about Zeising, and this book

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