Life

Little is known about Fibonacci’s life beyond the few facts given in his mathematical writings. During Fibonacci’s boyhood his father, Guglielmo, a Pisan merchant, was appointed consul over the community of Pisan merchants in the North African port of Bugia (now Bejaïa, Algeria). Fibonacci was sent to study calculation with an Arab master. He later went to Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily, and Provence, where he studied different numerical systems and methods of calculation.

The Liber abaci, which was widely copied and imitated, drew the attention of the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II. (Nothing Holy about Rome)  In the 1220s Fibonacci was invited to appear before the emperor at Pisa, and there John of Palermo, a member of Frederick’s scientific entourage, propounded a series of problems, three of which Fibonacci presented in his books. The first two belonged to a favourite Arabic type, the indeterminate, which had been developed by the 3rd-century Greek mathematician Diophantus. This was an equation with two or more unknowns for which the solution must be in rational numbers (whole numbers or common fractions). The third problem was a third-degree equation (i.e., containing a cube), x³ + 2x² + 10x = 20 (expressed in modern algebraic notation), which Fibonacci solved by a trial-and-error method known as approximation; he arrived at the answerin sexagesimal fractions (a fraction using the Babylonian number system that had a base of 60), which, when translated into modern decimals (1.3688081075), is correct to nine decimal places.

Contributions to number theory

For several years Fibonacci corresponded with Frederick II and his scholars, exchanging problems with them. He dedicated his Liber quadratorum (1225; “Book of Square Numbers”) to Frederick. Devoted entirely to Diophantine equations of the second degree (i.e., containing squares), the Liber quadratorum is considered Fibonacci’s masterpiece.

It is a systematically arranged collection of theorems, many invented by the author, who used his own proofs to work out general solutions. Probably his most creative work was in congruent numbers—numbers that give the same remainder when divided by a given number. He worked out an original solution for finding a number that, when added to or subtracted from a square number, leaves a square number. His statement that x² + y² and x² − y² could not both be squares was of great importance to the determination of the area of rational right triangles. Although the Liber abaci was more influential and broader in scope, the Liber quadratorum alone ranks Fibonacci as the major contributor to number theory between Diophantus and the 17th-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat.

Except for his role in spreading the use of the Hindu-Arabic numerals, Fibonacci’s contribution to mathematics has been largely overlooked. His name is known to modern mathematicians mainly because of the Fibonacci sequence (see below) derived from a problem in the Liber abaci:

A certain man put a pair of rabbits in a place surrounded on all sides by a wall. How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from that pair in a year if it is supposed that every month each pair begets a new pair which from the second month on becomes productive?

The resulting number sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 (Fibonacci himself omitted the first term), in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, is the first recursive number sequence (in which the relation between two or more successive terms can be expressed by a formula) known in Europe. Terms in the sequence were stated in a formula by the French-born mathematician Albert Girard in 1634: u_{n + 2} = u_{n + 1} + u_n, in which u represents the term and the subscript its rank in the sequence. The mathematician Robert Simson at the University of Glasgow in 1753 noted that, as the numbers increased in magnitude, the ratio between succeeding numbers approached the number α, the golden ratio, whose value is 1.6180…, or (1 + Square root of√5)/2. In the 19th century the term Fibonacci sequence was coined by the French mathematician Edouard Lucas, and scientists began to discover such sequences in nature; for example, in the spirals of sunflower heads, in pine cones, in the regular descent (genealogy) of the male bee, in the related logarithmic (equiangular) spiral in snail shells, in the arrangement of leaf buds on a stem, and in animal horns.

Frances Carney GiesThe Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica