B- for the da Vinci Code

Harold Thimbleby

Dan Brown's The da Vinci Code has become a publishing phenomenon, not least because of its inaccurate and controversial recasting of early Christian history, which upset the Church.

Its science is inaccurate too.

A character in the story called Prof Robert Langdon makes a comment about the sex ratio of bees. He claims the ratio is "the divine proportion" - otherwise known as the Golden Ratio - a number about 1.618. It's a point that suits the storyline, but he's wrong.

We see where this confusion came from, and show the real story is far more interesting.

• The story: PDF
• The story: HTML
• This is how the story was written, as a Mathematica notebook - which you'll need Mathematica to make much use of.

  Get Mathematica or a reader from Wolfram.

• This web page shows the Fibonacci numbers, and if you have the right browser (it isn't yet browser independent; it certainly works in Safari), it'll also show you how it works.