For over 150 years, many people have claimed that the number popularly known as the Golden Section has particularly appealing aesthetic properties when incorporated into the proportions of visual artworks. Although the empirical evidence for these claims has been equivocal, in the 1980s an important mathematical argument seemed to show that many, perhaps nearly all, empirical discoveries of the legendary number in art and nature were probably mathematical artifacts. This article overturns that argument as being, itself, the artifact of an unrealistic assumption.
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