Finding Fibonacci

Leonard of Pisa (Fibonacci) published his seminal Liber Abbaci in Latin in 1202, with a second edition in 1228, but the English version did not become available until 2002, and was 600 pages long. The importance of the book is the way it brought Hindu-Arabic numerals into widespread use along with a huge number of illustrations of practical problems, many about horses (e.g. on p. 122). It was these examples of arithmetic and algebra that made the book so useful to merchants and ensured its wide influence. The Fibonacci sequence itself has an earlier ancestry, and his own illustration is about the breeding patterns of rabbits. The book as a whole gives a fascinating account of the author's journey in finding out as much as he could about the author and his book. Towards the end, he draws an interesting parallel between Leonard and Steve Jobs, also drawing on the work of William Goetzmann about his role in the birth of modern finance. Fibonacci and Jobs initiated revolutions in their respective eras, both of which involved computation and the widespread uptake of new tools. They provided a new interface in terms respectively of the Hindu number system and WIMPS computers and both proved natural and easy-to-use, so one can readily underestimate what a huge step they represented.