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The Man Of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution (2011)

by Keith J. Devlin(Favorite Author)

3.25 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0802778127 (ISBN13: 9780802778123)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Walker & Company

review 1: Difficult to read at times and often repetitive but an interesting story. Fibonacci learned the math of the Islamic countries and traders on the Mediterranean and taught it to the traders of Europe. Before this time Europe used Roman Numerals which prevented the use of 0, multiplication, and division ... not to mention that simple addition and subtraction was very difficult. Specially trained mathematicians used the abacus and the average citizen and trader did not know basic math. Fibonacci changed all of that so that the average citizen could do the math that at one time was only done by a specialized few.
review 2: This biography, kind of, is like the one I recently read of Eratosthenes. In both cases it seems to me that the authors did boatloads of rese... morearch, came up nearly empty-handed, but had to produce something to justify the work they had done. So there are a bunch of interesting facts about Pisa, about the states of math and commerce in thirteenth century "Italy" and about Indian contributions to mathematics, and a few about Leonardo of Pisa. less

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