The mysterious sigils of Night King on Game of Thrones have a base in mathematics

Upcoming Spoilers for Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 1, "Winterfell".

As we approach the end of Game of thronesthere are still some huge unresolved mysteries. The public still knows relatively little about White Walkers. Their origins were revealed in Season 6, but the extent of their powers was not explained, nor were the mysterious symbols they leave behind in their bloodshed. The premiere of season 8, "Winterfell," highlights one of these symbols, made up of parts of the human body. But this is just one of the many times we've seen it, and there are different ways to interpret what it means.

The first time Game of thrones associate a curious symbol with the Army of the Dead in Season 1, Episode 1, "Winter Comes" when wildings of body parts are left in a strange circle with a line in the middle. This looks like. A member of Night's Watch discovers this symbol in the snow and sees a delirious girl who has been stuck in a tree, dead, behind him. The imagery of a strange circle and an additional sacrifice appear again at the premiere of Season 8, when Ned Umber's body is found pinned to a wall in the center of a spiral.

Φ is the Greek symbol, phi, which has various uses in science and mathematics. The most famous is that it represents the golden ratio, which appears frequently in geometry, art and architecture throughout history. As seen in Season 1, it seems that White Walkers pervert the number of gold and send some kind of disturbing message to humans who observe it.

The spiral we see at the end of "Winterfell" also seems to have roots in mathematics. It looks like the Fibonacci Spiral, a golden spiral whose growth factor is, the number of gold. It expands by one factor for every quarter turn it takes. We could interpret this as more humans killed and absorbed by the army of the dead, this number increasing with each new slaughter.

Andrew Beveridge, professor of mathematics at Macalester College, explains that the White Walker spiral goes in the opposite direction to that of a golden spiral, but that it is "very pretty" to a golden spiral in the direction of the needles. a watch. Beveridge measured the expansion of each quarter turn and found it at 1.616, which is close to the expansion factor of the golden spiral of 1.618. "Not bad for the frozen undead," he says. "So, if you ask me: yes, the White Walkers made eight golden spirals in a clockwise fashion."

Yet, the fan theory is not 100% perfect. As to whether the first symbol seen in "Winter ising" is indeed, Beveridge states, "I agree that it is close enough. But I would like the circle not to end at 11 o'clock or the vertical line to extend above the circle. In this way, it would correspond to one of two lowercase phi variants. Personally, I would not put my money on that one. "

So far, the inclusion of these strange symbols in the series seems to be a break with George R.R. Martin's source novels. The books mention swirls and swirling patterns in eggs and dragon cloths, but they have no greater meaning. On the HBO show, however, we know that before the White Walkers started using these symbols, their creators, the forest kids, had also used them – carved in stone rather than in the flesh.

In season 6, Bran observed that the stones surrounding a beech tree were arranged in a particular spiral pattern. After spotting the symbol, he sees one of the forest's children, Leaf, stabbing one of the first men with a dragonglass, turning him into the first White Walker, aka the king of the night. Later in season 7, when Jon takes Daenerys to a Dragonstone cave, they study the ancient spiral engravings on the walls drawn by the children of the forest.

The showrunner David Benioff explained in a behind-the-scenes clip of Season 7, Episode 4, that he had introduced the showrunner D.B. Weiss drew these ideas from the real world. "These are models that have a mystical meaning for the children of the forest. We do not know exactly what they mean, but spiral patterns are important in many different cultures of our world, so it makes sense that they are also in this world, "said Benioff. The symbols also appear naturally when Dothraki's riders surround Daenerys in Season 5 and Season 3 when surrounded by the crowd.

A fan theory suggests that spirals symbolize magic and its proximity to humans. Others point out that the symbols resemble the multiple Targaryen Sigil dragonheads. Another possibility is that the spirals simply mean the circle of life (and the undead). As Varys says in the premiere of Season 8, looking at Jon and Daenerys, "Nothing lasts." There is also the idea that history repeats itself and that life is cyclical. In Season 1, Episode 1, Ned Stark tells Bran that White Walkers do not appear in thousands of years. Seven seasons later, they are back. In other words, the symbol could be a warning that the White Walkers will always come back for humans to be part of their undead army.