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Dr. Levin's golden grid.
A mathematical gauging of a smile
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Dr. Eddy Levin of Harley Street puts a golden ratio, not just golden teeth, into his patients’ mouths. Dr. Levin has been at this for a while. It was he who in 1978 wrote a study called “Dental Esthetics and the Golden Proportion,” which graced pages 244–52 of that year’s September issue of The Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry.1
The golden ratio is a special number that has caught the eye and imagination of mathematicians, of artists, and now, thanks to Dr. Levin, of dentists. Some call it the “golden mean” (philosophers, though, use that phrase to mean something else). Some call it the “golden section.” Some Germans call it, evocatively, the “goldener Schnitt.” Almost everyone calls it beautiful.
The golden ratio is the number you get when you compare the lengths of certain parts of certain perfectly beautiful things (among them: snail shell spirals, the Parthenon in Athens, and Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper”). You’ll find that the ratio of the bigger part to the smaller equals the ratio of the combined length to the bigger. That ratio, that number, is always the same, ever so slightly bigger than 1.6180339.
If doing sums causes you pain, just go find someone who has perfect teeth and who won’t mind you staring into his or her mouth.
Dr. Levin explains on his website2 that many years ago he was both studying math and trying to find out what made teeth look beautiful. “It was at a moment,” he writes, “like when Archimedes got into his bath, that I suddenly realized that the two were connected — the Golden Proportion and the beauty of teeth. I began to put this into practise and started testing my ideas on my patients. My first case was a young girl in a hospital, where I was teaching, whose front teeth were in a terrible state and needed crowning. Despite the scepticism of the other members of staff and the unenthusiastic technicians with whom I had to work and whose co-operation I depended upon, I crowned all her front teeth, using the principles of the Golden Proportion. Everybody, including the young lady herself, agreed that her teeth now looked magnificent.”
Most important, in Dr. Levin’s reckoning, is the simple tooth-to-tooth ratio: “The four front teeth, from central incisor to premolar are the most significant part of the smile and they are in the Golden Proportion to each other.”
Dr. Levin created an instrument called the “golden mean gauge.” Made of stainless steel 1.5 millimeters thick, and retailing for £85, it shows whether the numerous major dental landmarks “are in the Golden Proportion,” and it is suitable for autoclaving.
Dr. Levin also offers a larger version that is “useful for full face measurements” and “useful to measure larger objects or bigger pictures of furniture etc.”
(Thanks to Stanley Eigen for bringing this to our attention.)
1. “Dental Esthetics and the Golden Proportion,” E.I. Levin, Journal of Prosthetic Dentistry, vol. 40, no. 3, September 1978, pp. 244–52.
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The article above is from the May-June 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Photo by Jessica L. Tracy
Psst, guys! Wanna know the secret to getting girls? According to a new
study by University of British Columbia, you should ditch the happy face and opt for the brooding, serious look:
"While showing a happy face is considered essential to friendly social interactions, including those involving sexual attraction — few studies have actually examined whether a smile is, in fact, attractive," says Prof. Jessica Tracy of UBC’s Dept. of Psychology. "This study finds that men and women respond very differently to displays of emotion, including smiles."
In a series of studies, more than 1,000 adult participants rated the sexual attractiveness of hundreds of images of the opposite sex engaged in universal displays of happiness (broad smiles), pride (raised heads, puffed-up chests) and shame (lowered heads, averted eyes).
The study found that women were least attracted to smiling, happy men, preferring those who looked proud and powerful or moody and ashamed. In contrast, male participants were most sexually attracted to women who looked happy, and least attracted to women who appeared proud and confident.
Having a bad Monday? Take a look at this smiling dog and tell me it doesn’t just made your day a bit better! (Photo provenance unknown, let me know if you know the original source, please!)
Edit 5/2/11: It’s Neatoramanaut’s SemJay’s dog Qoppa! Thanks SemJay!
Do Americans smile too much? An opinion piece at Pravda says “Americans smile all the time as if they are plugged in.” That is, compared to Russians.
For some reason, a smile makes a Russian person suspicious. Many Russians think that those who smile a lot are not really healthy mentally.
American Annette Loftus, who visited the Soviet Union for the first time in 1991, said that she was culturally shocked when she returned to the USA and saw the smiling Americans around.
Many Russian tourists traveling to Thailand still feel uncomfortable about this country. Thailand is known as a country of a thousand smiles.
“No smile feature is one of the brightest traits of a Russian individual,” professor Sternin believes. “In Russia, a smile is not a signal of politeness. It is not considered normal in Russia to smile to strangers, the Russians do not return a smile for a smile automatically.”
“The paradox is: the Russians smile less because they are more open to others. The Russian seriousness is a habit not to conceal people’s feelings and emotions. Historically, the Russians are mostly in a bad mood, but they are not hiding it,” the professor believes.
But what if you genuinely feel good and want to share the happiness? Maybe that’s the problem with Americans. Link -via J-Walk Blog
Hugh Newman has a gift that works on everyone but the one person he wants most to please. A award-winning short by writer/director/composer Kurt Kuenne. -Thanks, Holistic CPA!
Lauren McCarthy created the Happiness Hat – a gadget that detects whether or not you’re smiling. If you’re not, it drives a small metal spike into the back of your head to encourage to you resolve that problem quickly:
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.
Link via Geekologie
UPDATE 10/29: The YouTube video’s status was switched to private, so I swapped it out for a Vimeo version.
Barack Obama’s amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.
First, it was Paris Hilton and now, Barack Obama. Eric Spiegelman noticed that when President Obama hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he held the exact same smile in every photograph:
Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.
On Wednesday, the Obamas hosted a reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, during which they stood for 130 photographs with visiting foreign dignitaries in town for the UN meeting. The President has exactly the same smile in every single shot. See for yourself — the pictures are up on the State Department’s flickr (link below). And, of course, compressed into 20 seconds for your viewing pleasure.
There can only be on explanation: it was the Obamabot stand-in. The real President Obama was probably too busy dealing with the Russian Dead Hand in an underground bunker to be bothered by this museum stuff!
