14 Facts About Matila Ghyka

Matila Ghyka did not return to Romania after World War II, and was one of the most significant members of the Romanian diaspora.

Matila Ghyka was born in Iasi, the former capital of Moldavia, of the Ghica family of boyars.

Matila Ghyka's mother was Maria Ghyljia and his father was Matila Costiecu, a Wallachian officer.

Maria's half-brother was Grigoire Ghyka, who adopted Matila when he was a teenager so that he would acquire the title of Prince as Matila was the great-grandson of Grigore Alexandru Ghica, last reigning Prince of Moldavia before the union of the Danubian Principalities.

However, much of Matila Ghyka's inherited capital was via his grandmother's Bals family.

Matila Ghyka became a French Navy midshipman and made a cruise in a frigate to the Caribbean.

Matila Ghyka entered the Romanian Navy as a junior officer, serving mainly on the Danube.

Matila Ghyka was involved in taking newly constructed river gunboats from the Thames Iron Works to Romania via European waterways.

Matila Ghyka became a friend of Marcel Proust and a "pieton de Paris" with the poet Leon-Paul Fargue.

Matila Ghyka was predeceased by his wife Eileen, who died on 10 February 1963.

Matila Ghyka returned to mathematics around 1920 when Albert Einstein's theories were published, and over the next few years developed ideas on the mathematics of form which he published in 1927 as Esthetique des proportions dans la nature et dans les arts, and revised and expanded in his two volume Le nombre d'or.

Matila Ghyka developed a personal philosophy in which all living things were endowed with an energy and functioned with a rhythm related to that of the golden ratio.

Around 1945 Matila Ghyka was offered a visiting Professorship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles because the President of the university had read Esthetique des proportions, and this was followed in 1947 by a job in the Art Department of Mary Washington College, where he taught his personal aesthetic theories for three years.

Matila Ghyka has been the subject of recent publications in German and Romanian.