During the First World War he was Romanian Navy liaison officer on the Russian cruiser Rostislav, acting as a shore bombardment director along the Black Sea coast.

A frequent visitor of Natalie Clifford Barney's literary salon, he also met most of the American "exiled" writers of the 1920s, but his chief interest was always the synthesis of high mathematics and poetry.

[6] After World War II, Ghyka fled Communist Romania, and was visiting professor of aesthetics in the United States, at the University of Southern California and at the Mary Washington College, Virginia.

Ghyka published his memoirs in two volumes in French, Escales de ma jeunesse (1955) and Heureux qui, comme Ulysse… (1956) under the collective title Couleur du monde; a shortened and revised version appeared in English in 1961 as The World Mine Oyster.

[8] In around 1900, Ghyka spent a year studying engineering at the École supérieure d'électricité de Paris, Whilst there he developed his own mathematical ideas on the relationship between thermodynamics and living matter, partly under the influence of Gustave Le Bon.

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.

[9] Further work was published in French as Essai sur le rythme (1938), Tour d'horizon philosophique (1946) and Philosophie et Mystique du nombre (1952), and in English as The Geometry of Art and Life (1946).