Phi

Phi (uppercase Φ, lowercase or ; Ancient Greek: ϕεῖ, pheî, [pʰé͜e]; modern Greek: φι, fi, [fi]; English: /faɪ/) is the 21st letter of the Greek alphabet. In Ancient Greek, it represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive ([pʰ]), which was the origin of its usual romanization as "ph". In modern Greek, it represents a voiceless labiodental fricative ([f]) and is correspondingly romanized as "f". Its origin is uncertain but it may be that phi originated as the letter qoppa and initially represented the sound /kʷʰ/ before shifting to Classical Greek [pʰ]. In traditional Greek numerals, phi has a value of 500 (φʹ) or 500 000 (͵φ). The Cyrillic letter Ef (Ф, ф) descends from phi.

Phi is also used as a symbol for the golden ratio and on other occasions in math and science. This use is separately encoded as the Unicode glyph ϕ. The modern Greek pronunciation of the letter is sometimes encountered in English (as /fiː/) when the letter is being used in this sense.

Use as a symbol

The lower-case letter φ (or often its variant, ϕ) is often used to represent the following:

Golden ratio

In mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities. The figure on the right illustrates the geometric relationship. Expressed algebraically, for quantities a and b with a > b > 0,

where the Greek letter phi ( or ) represents the golden ratio. Its value is:

The golden ratio also is called the golden mean or golden section (Latin: sectio aurea). Other names include extreme and mean ratio,medial section, divine proportion, divine section (Latin: sectio divina), golden proportion, golden cut, and golden number.

Some twentieth-century artists and architects, including Le Corbusier and Dalí, have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio—especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio—believing this proportion to be aesthetically pleasing. The golden ratio appears in some patterns in nature, including the spiral arrangement of leaves and other plant parts.

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the first alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science and other fields.

In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between upper-case and lower-case forms in parallel with Latin during the modern era.

Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient Greek and Modern Greek usage, because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. Polytonic orthography, which is used for Ancient Greek and sometimes for Modern Greek, has many diacritics, such as accent marks for pitch accent, the breathing marks for the presence and absence of the /h/ sound, and the iota subscript for the historical /i/ sound. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, which uses only two diacritics: the acute accent and diaeresis.

Bao Phi

Bao Phi is a Vietnamese American spoken word artist, writer and community activist living in Minnesota.

Early life and education

Bao Phi was born Thien-bao in Saigon, Vietnam, the youngest son of a mostly Vietnamese mother and a Chinese Vietnamese father. He grew up in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis near the Little Earth housing projects. Phi attended South High School and began performing his poetry when competing on the South High speech team in the Creative Expression category in the early 1990s. He attended and graduated from Macalester College, where he was encouraged to pursue creative writing by Native American Literature professor Diane Glancy. He worked as a pizza delivery boy, a maintenance worker in a supermarket and in the restaurant industry.

Poetry, activism and literature

Phi won the Minnesota Grand Poetry Slam twice. He also won two poetry slams at the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York. He is the first Vietnamese American man to have appeared on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and the National Poetry Slam Individual Finalists Stage, where he placed 6th overall out of over 250 national slam poets. Phi has been a featured performer at numerous venues and schools locally and nationally, from the Nuyorican Poet's Café to the University of California, Berkeley.