LESSON 1

FIBONACCI

The 13th Century Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known

by his nickname Fibonacci, was perhaps the most talented
Western mathematician of the Middle Ages. Little is known
of his life except that he was the son of a customs offical
and, as a child, he travelled around North Africa with his
father, where he learned about Arabic mathematics. On his
return to Italy, he helped to disseminate this knowledge
throughout Europe, thus setting in motion a rejuvenation in
European mathematics, which had lain largely dormant for
centuries during the Dark Ages.

In particular, in 1202, he wrote a hugely influential book

called “Liber Abaci” (“Book of Calculation”), in which he promoted the use of the Hindu-Arabic
numeral system, describing its many benefits for merchants and mathematicians alike over the
clumsy system of Roman numerals then in use in Europe. Despite its obvious advantages,
uptake of the system in Europe was slow (this was after all during the time of the Crusades
against Islam, a time in which anything Arabic was viewed with great suspicion), and Arabic
numerals were even banned in the city of Florence in 1299 on the pretext that they were easier
to falsify than Roman numerals. However, common sense eventually prevailed and the new
system was adopted throughout Europe by the 15th century, making the Roman system
obsolete. The horizontal bar notation for fractions
was also first used in this work (although following
the Arabic practice of placing the fraction to the
left of the integer).

Fibonacci is best known, though, for his

introduction into Europe of a particular number
sequence, which has since become known as
Fibonacci Numbers or the Fibonacci Sequence. He
discovered the sequence – the first recursive
number sequence known in Europe – while
considering a practical problem in the “Liber Abaci”
involving the growth of a hypothetical population of
rabbits based on idealized assumptions. He noted
that, after each monthly generation, the number of
pairs of rabbits increased from 1 to 2 to 3 to 5 to 8
to 13, etc, and identified how the sequence progressed by adding the previous two terms (in
mathematical terms, Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2), a sequence which could in theory extend indefinitely.

The sequence, which had actually been known to Indian mathematicians since the 6th
Century, has many interesting mathematical properties, and many of the implications and
relationships of the sequence were not discovered until several centuries after Fibonacci’s
death. For instance, the sequence regenerates itself in some surprising ways: every third F-
number is divisible by 2 (F3 = 2), every fourth F-number is divisible by 3 (F4 = 3), every fifth F-
number is divisible by 5 (F5 = 5), every sixth F-number is divisible by 8 (F6 = 8), every seventh
F-number is divisible by 13 (F7 = 13), etc. The numbers of the sequence has also been found to
be ubiquitous in nature: among other things, many species of flowering plants have numbers of
petals in the Fibonacci Sequence; the spiral arrangements of pineapples occur in 5s and 8s,
those of pinecones in 8s and 13s, and the seeds of sunflower heads in 21s, 34s, 55s or even
higher terms in the sequence; etc

In the 1750s, Robert Simson noted that the ratio of

each term in the Fibonacci Sequence to the previous
term approaches, with ever greater accuracy the
higher the terms, a ratio of approximately 1 :
1.6180339887 (it is actually an irrational number
equal to (1 + √5)⁄2 which has since been calculated to
thousands of decimal places). This value is referred
to as the Golden Ratio, also known as the Golden
Mean, Golden Section, Divine Proportion, etc, and is
usually denoted by the Greek letter phi φ (or
sometimes the capital letter Phi Φ). Essentially, two
quantities are in the Golden Ratio if the ratio of the
sum of the quantities to the larger quantity is equal
to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one.
The Golden Ratio itself has many unique properties,
such as 1⁄φ = φ – 1 (0.618…) and φ2 = φ + 1
(2.618…), and there are countless examples of it to
be found both in nature and in the human world.

A rectangle with sides in the ratio of 1 : φ is known as a Golden Rectangle, and many artists
and architects throughout history (dating back to ancient Egypt and Greece, but particularly
popular in the Renaissance art of Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries) have proportioned
their works approximately using the Golden Ratio and Golden Rectangles, which are widely
considered to be innately aesthetically pleasing. An arc connecting opposite points of ever
smaller nested Golden Rectangles forms a logarithmic spiral, known as a Golden Spiral. The
Golden Ratio and Golden Spiral can also be found in a surprising number of instances in Nature,
from shells to flowers to animal horns to human bodies to storm systems to complete galaxies.
It should be remembered, though, that the Fibonacci Sequence was actually only a very minor
element in “Liber Abaci” – indeed, the sequence only received Fibonacci’s name in 1877 when
Eduouard Lucas decided to pay tribute to him by naming the series after him – and that
Fibonacci himself was not responsible for identifying any of the interesting mathematical
properties of the sequence, its relationship to the Golden Mean and Golden Rectangles and
Spirals, etc.

However, the book’s influence on medieval

mathematics is undeniable, and it does also
include discussions of a number of other
mathematical problems such as the Chinese
Remainder Theorem, perfect numbers and
prime numbers, formulas for arithmetic series
and for square pyramidal numbers, Euclidean
geometric proofs, and a study of simultaneous
linear equations along the lines
of Diophantus and Al-Karaji. He also
described the lattice (or sieve) multiplication
method of multiplying large numbers, a
method – originally pioneered by Islamic
mathematicians like Al-Khwarizmi –
algorithmically equivalent to long
multiplication.

Neither was “Liber Abaci” Fibonacci’s only book, although it was his most important one. His
“Liber Quadratorum” (“The Book of Squares”), for example, is a book on algebra, published in
1225 in which appears a statement of what is now called Fibonacci’s identity – sometimes also
known as Brahmagupta’s identity after the much earlier Indian mathematician who also
came to the same conclusions – that the product of two sums of two squares is itself a sum of
two squares e.g. (12 + 42)(22 + 72) = 262 + 152 = 302 + 12.