Rectangles and spirals

Extract

Every reader knows about the Golden Rectangle (see [1, pp. 85, 119], [2, 3]), and that it can be subdivided into a square and a smaller copy of itself, and that this process can be continued indefinitely, converging towards the intersection point of diagonals of any two successive rectangles in the sequence. The circumscribed logarithmic spiral passing through the vertices and converging to the same point is also familiar (see [3, 4]), and is analogous to the circumcircle of a regular polygon or a triangle. The approximate logarithmic spiral obtained by drawing a quarter-circle inside each of the squares is equally well known [3, p. 64]. Perhaps slightly less familiar is the inscribed spiral, which is tangential to a side of every rectangle, like the incircle of a triangle or a regular polygon. It does not (quite) coincide with the spiral passing through the point of subdivision of each side, as discussed in [3, pp. 73-77]. The Golden Rectangle, its subdivisions, and the circumscribed and inscribed spirals are illustrated in Figure 1.