Biography Of Leonardo Of Pisa

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Leonardo of Pisa or Leonardo Pisano was born in Pisa, Italy (yes, the city of the Leaning Tower) in about 1175 AD. His father was Guglielmo Bonacci, a customs officer in a town called Béjaïa. Béjaïa was known then as Bougie or Bogia, a town where candles made of wax were exported to France. Leonardo grew up with a North African education and traveled around the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. This means he would have interacted with many different kinds of merchants and learned their mathematical algorithms. He believed there were a lot of advantages to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system above all others. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system is the system of using combinations of ten digits (0-9) to represent all possible numbers.
DO NOT confuse Leonardo of Pisa with Leonardo da Vinci! Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452, around 200 years after Leonardo of Pisa died! Also, besides the fact that they lived 200 years apart, Leonardo of Pisa was born in Pisa, while Leonardo da Vinci was born in Vinci (a couple miles towards Florence, Italy from Pisa).
So where the heck did the name “Fibonacci” come from? Well, the following are a couple different explanations for it: one very reasonable explanation is that it is a shortening of “filius Bonacci”, which translates from Latin meaning “the son of Bonacci” (which was his family name). That makes sense, right? From “filius Bonacci” to “Fi-bonacci”. Another explanation is that Bonacci may be a nickname that means “son of good fortune”, so “lucky son”.
Leonardo Fibonacci was one who introduced the Hindu-Arabic number system into Europe. This number system is the one we still use today, based on ten digits with its decimal point, plus the symbol for 0. Again, these numbers are 0-9 with the decimal poi...

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...started calling this sequence of number the “Fibonacci sequence”? Edouard Lucas was the mathematician in France who gave the sequence its name. Lucas lived from (1842-1891). He also found many other important applications for the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, and made his own series of numbers that are extremely closely related to Fibonacci’s. The Lucas Numbers went as follows: 2, 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29, 47, … The only difference in these two sequences is that Lucas switched the 2 and the 1’s positions to set up and solve many other problems.
Leonardo Fibonacci died in the 1240’s. There is a commemorative statue of him in Pisa at the end of a cemetery close to the Cathedral in Pisa.
In all, Leonardo Fibonacci was a great mathematician who brought the Hindu-Arabic number system and the Fibonacci sequence to Europe. He was born in Pisa, Italy in the 15th century.

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