Leonardo Pisano :: essays research papers

Leonardo Pisano   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  I researched a scientist or rather a mathematician that made contributions to his discipline such that they have affected a majority of the people that have lived on this earth since his time. His name is Leonardo Pisano. It is hypothesized that Leonardo was born in the town of Pisa which is in modern day Italy circa 1170. Leonardo moved at a young age with his father to a town in northern Algeria. Leonardo’s father held a diplomatic post where his job was to represent the merchants of the republic. At a young age Leonardo worked with numbers learning the in and outs of accounting and balancing books. In Algeria and other countries that he visited with his father he learned different numbering systems and how they had advantages to the one that he grew up with. In Algeria from the Arabs he learned the base 10 system and was responsible to spreading this system across Europe which in turn was spread across the world and is now the most widely used number sys tem (Connor 1998). Most people today know Leonardo by his nickname Fibonacci.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  By the turn of the century Fibonacci had returned to Italy and began to write texts. He wrote on number theory, geometry, algebra, and documented problems and proofs. Fibonacci lived before the printing press had been invented and all copies of his books had to be had written copies from his own hand written copies. Today we still have four of his books; Liber abaci (1202), Practica geometriae (1220), Flos (1225), and Liber quadratorum.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  According to an article by Keith Devlin, Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, Fibonacci’s first book Liber abaci is â€Å"the book that gave numbers to the western world†. Fibonacci was born in the Roman Empire and therefore was taught in his youth the Roman numeral system which is very limiting when one wants to calculate complex equations. As mentioned earlier Fibonacci traveled extensively in northern Africa with his father where he learned the base ten system from the Arabic people who in turn learned it from the people of India who developed it sometime in the first millennium. In his book Liber abaci or â€Å"The Book of calculation† he documented the system in detail that he learned from the Arab traders including its efficiency in performing arithmetic (Delvin 2002).