Leonardo Of Pis The Father Of Fibonacci

Known by his nick name Fibonacci, Leonardo of Pisa, was born in Italy during the 13th Century. The name Fibonacci came about due to someone misreading “filius Bonacci” on a manuscript which was son of Bonaccio. His passion for numbers were developed while he was a child and was probably due to his father’s career as a Pisan merchant (Hom, 2013). His travels were extensive to his father’s trade and during his life time mathematics was extremely important (Hom, 203). Fibonacci introduced the Hindu-Arabic number system to the Italians where it was rejected due to the affiliation with Islam (Fibonacci, n.d.). The Italians preferred the Roman numeral system (Fibonacci, n.d.) It was not until the fifteenth century that the Hindu-Arabic number …show more content…
In fact, he contributed to the writing of geometry, commercial arithmetic, and irrational numbers as well as developed the concept of zero (Hom, 2013). Fibonacci was the first to use the horizontal fraction bar notation in his work, but he was best known for his Fibonacci Sequence (Fibonacci, n.d.). Fibonacci’s numbers always start with either a zero or a one and to obtain the next number in the sequence, one simply adds the previous two pairs of numbers (Fibonacci Numbers, n.d.). This discovery, also known as the first recursive number sequence in Europe, was a complete accident due to his work on a hypothetical condition of the population of rabbits (Fibonacci, n.d.). Fibonacci’s work concerning the rabbits was one that consisted of the perfect situation in which a male and female rabbit were placed in a field to mate. The idea situation was if the rabbits mated at the end of their first month of life, by the age of two months another pair of rabbits would be born. Fibonacci thought if the rabbits continued with each pair mating at the end of their first month of life, the rabbit’s family would consist of the number of new pairs, which is the number of pairs in month n – 2, plus the number of pairs alive the previous month (n – 1) which is the end of the nth month and all of this is known as the nth Fibonacci number (Fibonacci Numbers n.d.). Though Fibonacci was credited for his find, it was actually known to Indian mathematicians as Virahanka numbers (Fibonacci, n.d.). Rabbits were not the only application of Fibonacci numbers. Another interesting application was with honey bees. I did not realize if a bee lays an egg unfertilized, a male bee is born which results in one parent but, if a female bee is born it is due to a male fertilizing the egg resulting in the female bee having two parents (Brock, 2013). The result of this phenomenon is getting