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Editorial

The Beauty of Numbers

by Rick Lewis

Even to my untrained ear, there is a difference between the sound of Led Zeppelin playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and the rather less tuneful sounds I produce on my guitar. We all seem to agree on when a sequence of notes is harmonious and when it isn’t. 2,500 years ago, Pythagoras of Samos became the first person to discover an objective basis for this distinction: he found that on basic stringed instruments, the strings produced notes in harmony with one another if their lengths were ratios of whole numbers. This was the first time that anyone had realised that aspects of the world could be controlled by numerical relationships. Pythagoras went on to look for other mathematical ratios in the world; he found them everywhere, and rapidly came to the conclusion that numbers were holy.

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