The thinkers of ancient Egypt, Greece and India recognized that numbers governed much of what they saw in their world and hence provided an approach to its divine creator. Robert Lawlor sets out the system that determines the dimension and form of both man-made and natural structures, from Gothic cathedrals to flowers, from music to the human body. By also involving the reader in practical experiments, he leads with ease from simple principles to a grasp of the logarithmic spiral, the Golden Proportion, the squaring of the circle and the other ubiquitous ratios and proportions.