I looked for this secret for years. For a long time I was very serious about it, then I gave up because I couldn’t figure out what it was. But I always kept one eye open for an answer, always looking for a little clue that would maybe do it. And one day I got it.
The Polar-Graph Solution A Sixth-Grade Math Book A little boy I was taking care of was in the sixth grade, and he wanted to know about a particular mathematical problem. It was a relatively simple problem, but I didn’t remember how to do it. I looked through his book to remember how it went so I could explain it. As I was going through his book, I saw the geometry I needed—in a sixth-grade math book! The author of the book didn’t understand what I was seeing, because he was thinking along a totally different line. But I saw in the mathematics of it something I’d been looking for, and it was the key that tied these two primary sequences together. I’m sorry that I don’t remember the name of the book or the author—it was a long time ago—but it showed a polar graph and its relationship to a Golden Mean spiral. Figure 8-21 is a map of the South Pole on a polar graph. Notice the cross through the center, one line following the x axis and the other the y. Every circle does in fact have these lines crossing it. We demonstrated this by taking a flat disk about half an inch thick, randomly scattering sand all over it. We held it by a handle underneath and hit it with a wooden mallet. The sand would rearrange itself into a perfectly square cross like you see in this illustration. If we used a sound generator on the disk, the sand would change into many other geometrical patterns. But the very first pattern that emerges by striking a round disk 218