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including phi T-shirts and mugs. His bestselling product, however, is the PhiMatrix, a piece of software that creates a grid on your computer screen to check images for the golden ratio. Most purchasers use it as a design tool to make cutlery, furniture and homes. Some customers use it for financial speculation by superimposing the grid on graphs of indices and using phi to predict future trends. ‘A guy in the Caribbean was using my matrix to trade in oil, a guy in China was using it to trade in currencies,’ he said. Meisner was drawn to the golden mean because he is spiritual and says it helped him understand the universe, but even the Phi Guy thinks that his fellow travellers can go too far. He is, for example, unconvinced by the traders. ‘When you look back on the market it is pretty easy to find relationships that conform to phi,’ he said. ‘The challenge is that looking backwards is completely different to looking out the front window.’ Meisner’s website has made him the go-to guy for every flavour of phi aficionado. He told me that a month ago he received an email from an unemployed man who believed that the only way to get a job interview was to design his résumé in the proportions of the golden ratio. Meisner felt the man was deluded and took pity on him. He gave him some phi design tips, but suggested that it would be more fruitful investing in more traditional job-hunting methods such as business networking. ‘I got a letter from him this morning,’ Meisner blurted. ‘He said he has a job interview. He is giving credit to the résuménew design!’

Back in London I told Eddy Levin the story of the golden résumé as an example of excessive eccentricity. Levin, however, didn’t think it was funny. In fact, he agreed that a phi-proportioned résumé was better than a regular one. ‘It would look more beautiful, and so the reader would be more attracted to it.’

After 30 years of studying the golden ratio, Levin is convinced that wherever there is beauty, there will be phi. ‘Any art which looks good, the dominant proportions are the golden proportion,’ he said. He knows this is an unpopular viewpoint, as it prescribes a formula for beauty, but he guarantees he will be able to find phi in any piece of art.

My instinctive reaction to Levin’s phi obsession was one of scepticism. For a start, I was unconvinced that his gauge was accurate enough to measure 1.618 sufficiently precisely. It was not surprising to find a ratio of ‘approximately phi’ in a painting or a building, especially if you could select which parts to choose. Also, since the ratio of consecutive Fibonacci numbers makes a good approximation to 1.618, whenever there is a grid of 5×3 or 8×5 or 13×8 and so on, you will see a golden rectangle. Of course the ratio will be a common one.

Yet there was something compelling about Levin’s examples. I felt the thrill of wonder with each new image he showed me. Phi really was everywhere. Yes, the golden ratio has always attracted cranks, but this in itself did not mean that all the theories were crankish. Some very respectable academics have claimed that phi creates beauty, particularly in the structure of musical compositions. The argument that human beings might be drawn to a proportion that best expresses natural growth and regeneration does not seem too far-fetched.

It was a sunny summer’s day and Levin and I relocated to his garden. We sat on two lawn chairs and sipped tea. Levin told me that the limerick was a successful form of poetry because the syllables in its lines (8, 8, 5, 5, 8) are Fibonacci numbers. Then I had an idea. I asked Levin if he knew what an iPod was. He didn’t. I had one in my pocket and I took it out. It was a beautiful object, I said, and according to his reasoning, it should contain the golden ratio.

Levin took my shiny white iPod and held it in his palm. Yes, he replied, it was beautiful, and it should. Not wanting to get my hopes up, he warned me that factory-produced objects often do not follow the golden ratio perfectly. ‘The shape shifts slightly for the convenience of manufacture,’ he