Leonardo da Pisa
Leonardo da Pisa, whose original name was Leonardo Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician during the medieval era. He was born in 1170 and died around 1240, Leonardo da Pisa also wrote Liber abaci in 1202 (also known as the “Book of Abacus”) which was the first Indian and Arabian mathematics book in Europe (“Leonardo Pisano,” par. 1-2).
There is not much that is known about Leonardo da Pisa’s life except that he was the son of a merchant. Leonardo traveled to several countries, but he became familiar with the Hindu-Arabic number system somewhere between Barbary and Constantinople and realized that this number system had substantial practical advantages that the currently used Roman numeral system did not (“Leonardo Pisano,” par. 1-2).
The simplest mathematic…
As a matter of fact, Leonardo dedicated his book Liber Quadratorum, “Book of Square Numbers,” which was allocated strictly to Diophantine equations of the second degree, and was considered his masterpiece, to Fredrick II. The Liber Quadratorum contained many equations and theories which were developed by Leonardo himself, but his greatest contribution was his assertion that could not both equal squares was of huge importance in the determination of the area of rational right triangles (“Leonardo Pisano,” par. 3).
Leonardo do Pisa’s influence on mathematics has been by and large unnoticed except for his role is broadening the use of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Leonardo is primarily known for the Fibonacci sequence which is a derivative of a mathematical problem from the Liber Abaci:
A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded on all sides by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive? (“Leonardo Pisano,” par….
