It may happen that during a chat among friends is called the Fibonacci sequence. Not everyone knows what it is and more importantly, who is Fibonacci? You can answer with certainty that he was the greatest European mathematician of the middle ages!
Going to deeper it turns out that he led a very lively Fibonacci and interesting, under the banner of the encounter with other cultures.
Leonardo of Pisa or Pisa is known to most as Fibonacci, short which derives from "filius Bonacci," son of Bonacci.
The scholar was born in the beautiful Pisa, city of the famous leaning tower. Pisa, at that time, was an important commercial center and could boast links with the most important ports of the Mediterranean.
Leonardo's father, Guglielmo Bonacci, was a customs official in the current town of Bejaia, Algeria, from where they were exported wax candles .
So Leonardo grew up in North African and traveled along the Mediterranean coast. During this stage of his life Fibonacci met many traders and learned to know their systems of arithmetic. Soon realized the many benefits which involved the use of a system in particular: that Hindu-Arabic.
Leonardo Pisano was one of the first to introduce Hindu-Arabic numeral system or decimal number system in Europe, based on ten digits.
His book on arithmetic in the decimal system, Liber Abaci, persuaded many european scientists of his time to use this "new" System. The book describes, in Latin, the rules which we learn in elementary school to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers.
Speaking of numbers, the 23 was a lucky number for Pisano. In fact, it was precisely the day 23 November 1223 that the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II of Svevia, poses to the mathematician a question which made him famous for centuries to come.
The problem concerned the reproductive ability of a pair of rabbits in a year and it seems that Fibonacci solved the issue by referring to the "nine Indian figures" and their associated arithmetic. So, probably, was not directly the Pisan scientist who invented the series of numbers that now bears his name but Indian scholars previously ran in the same sequence.
The great mathematician, who dedicated much of his life researching and calculating, died in 1240. The city of Pisa commemorates, date, the distinguished citizen with different initiatives and the statue, which the sculptor Paganucci dedicated in 1863, vigil had on all those fellow citizens is the phrase of a famous song that says "mathematics will never be my job"!
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