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The spiral is started with an isosceles right triangle, with each leg having unit length.Another right triangle (which is the only automedian right triangle) is formed, with one leg being the hypotenuse of the prior right triangle (with length the square root of 2) and the other leg having length of 1; the length of the hypotenuse of this second right triangle is the square root of 3.
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The Ulam spiral or prime spiral is a graphical depiction of the set of prime numbers, devised by mathematician Stanisław Ulam in 1963 and popularized in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in Scientific American a short time later. [1] It is constructed by writing the positive integers in a square spiral and specially marking the prime ...
The Archimedean spiral (also known as Archimedes' spiral, the arithmetic spiral) is a spiral named after the 3rd-century BC Greek mathematician Archimedes. The term Archimedean spiral is sometimes used to refer to the more general class of spirals of this type (see below), in contrast to Archimedes' spiral (the specific arithmetic spiral of ...
Inverting this process allows square roots to be found, and similarly for the powers 3, 1/3, 2/3, and 3/2. Care must be taken when the base, x, is found in more than one place on its scale. For instance, there are two nines on the A scale; to find the square root of nine, use the first one; the second one gives the square root of 90.
A method analogous to piece-wise linear approximation but using only arithmetic instead of algebraic equations, uses the multiplication tables in reverse: the square root of a number between 1 and 100 is between 1 and 10, so if we know 25 is a perfect square (5 × 5), and 36 is a perfect square (6 × 6), then the square root of a number greater than or equal to 25 but less than 36, begins with ...
The length of the side of a larger square to the next smaller square is in the golden ratio. For a square with side length 1, the next smaller square is 1/φ wide. The next width is 1/φ², then 1/φ³, and so on. There are several comparable spirals that approximate, but do not exactly equal, a golden spiral. [2]
The spiral is a frequent symbol for spiritual purification, both within Christianity and beyond (one thinks of the spiral as the neo-Platonist symbol for prayer and contemplation, circling around a subject and ascending at the same time, and as a Buddhist symbol for the gradual process on the Path to Enlightenment).