Numbers & OperationsAlgebra
Fibonacci
c. 1170 – c. 1250 · Italy (Pisa)
The man who brought '0 and the Arabic numerals' to Europe
Fibonacci — Leonardo of Pisa — grew up the son of an Italian merchant along Mediterranean trade routes, where he saw how convenient the Arabic number system was. His book Liber Abaci spread zero and decimal calculation across a Europe still locked into Roman numerals. He is most widely remembered for the sequence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8… that grew out of a puzzle about breeding rabbits.
Key contributions
- Introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal system to Europe
- Spread practical arithmetic through Liber Abaci
- Introduced the Fibonacci sequence