Leonardo Fibonacci

Leonardo Fibonacci (c. 1170- c. 1250) spent his childhood in Italy with his father, Gulielmo. His mother, Alessandra, died when Fibonacci turned nine. As a result, Fibonacci spent a lot of time at his father’s trading post and traveling with his father. He then got the chance to study the Arabic numerical system in relation to the Roman numerals. In 1202, Fibonacci published the Liber Abaci, which introduced Europeans to the use of the Arabic numerical system in mathematics. In his book, he wrote of the Fibonacci sequence where, beginning with the two numbers 1 and 1, the next number is found by summing the two previous numbers. The ratio of two consecutive numbers in this sequence approaches the golden ratio, which was used in a lot of European Art.