The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution

As the first chapter started with 0, I thought it will be numbered as a Fibonacci series, but it was not so. 

Most of us know Fibonacci (pronounced as fi buh naa chee) only for the Fibonacci Series. I guessed, the book will be only about Fibonacci series but was very much surprised as I progressed. The Fibonacci series comes only in the last chapter.

It's interesting to know that his real name was Leonardo Pisano and was very famous for his book Liber abbaci. This book was the first to help the merchants, bankers, business people and scholars with the new arithmetic methods.

The below lines from the 0th chapter will give a different perspective as to what we know:

"Most of the credit for inventing and developing the methods Leonardo described in Liber abbaci goes to others, in particular Indian and Arabic scholars over many centuries. Leonardo's role was to "package" and "sell" the new methods to the world."

Brahmagupta from India was considered the first to formulate the concept of zero. The mathematical puzzles which originated in India long back have been found in Liber abbaci. I thought Omar Khayyamwas a famous poet from Iran. But he was a renowned Mathematician too.

Pisa had been blessed with two sons: Galileo in the 16th century and Leonardo Pisano in the 13th.

Maths might be tough and confusing for many students. When we solve a problem, we write each step and arrive at the solution. But, in those days, the solution was like reading an essay. The below is the solution for a Maths problem:

"You put 1/4 1/3 in order, and you subtract the 1 which is over the 3 from the 3 itself; there remains 2 that you multiply by the 4; and so on..."

After reading the below in the last chapter, I felt how ignorant I was.

"History almost forgot him, only a nickname given to him by a later historian surviving, and then only to refer to a sequence of numbers arising from a word problem he copied in his book from another source."

The source being one of the Indian Mathematicians. 

I feel every Mathematics book should credit him.