1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Leonardo of Pisa

by Moritz Cantor

LEONARDO OF PISA (Leonardus Pisanus or Fibonacci), Italian mathematician of the 13th century. Of his personal history few particulars are known. His father was called Bonaccio, most probably a nickname with the ironical meaning of “a good, stupid fellow,” while to Leonardo himself another nickname, Bigollone (dunce, blockhead), seems to have been given. The father was secretary in one of the numerous factories erected on the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean by the warlike and enterprising merchants of Pisa. Leonardo was educated at Bugia, and afterwards toured the Mediterranean. In 1202 he was again in Italy and published his great work, Liber abaci, which probably procured him access to the learned and refined court of the emperor Frederick II. Leonardo certainly was in relation with some persons belonging to that circle when he published in 1220 another more extensive work, De practica geometriae, which he dedicated to the imperial astronomer Dominicus Hispanus. Some years afterwards (perhaps in 1228) Leonardo dedicated to the well-known astrologer Michael Scott the second edition of his Liber abaci, which was printed with Leonardo’s other works by Prince Bald. Boncompagni (Rome, 1857–1862, 2 vols.). The other works consist of the Practica geometriae and some most striking papers of the greatest scientific importance, amongst which the Liber quadratorum may be specially signalized. It bears the notice that the author wrote it in 1225, and in the introduction Leonardo tells us the occasion of its being written. Dominicus had presented Leonardo to Frederick II. The presentation was accompanied by a kind of mathematical performance, in which Leonardo solved several hard problems proposed to him by John of Palermo, an imperial notary, whose name is met with in several documents dated between 1221 and 1240. The methods which Leonardo made use of in solving those problems fill the Liber quadratorum, the Flos, and a Letter to Magister Theodore. All these treatises seem to have been written nearly at the same period, and certainly before the publication of the second edition of the Liber abaci, in which the Liber quadratorum is expressly mentioned. We know nothing of Leonardo’s fate after he issued that second edition.

Leonardo’s works are mainly developments of the results obtained by his predecessors; the influences of Greek, Arabian, and Indian mathematicians may be clearly discerned in his methods. In his Practica geometriae plain traces of the use of the Roman agrimensores are met with; in his Liber abaci old Egyptian problems reveal their origin by the reappearance of the very numbers in which the problem is given, though one cannot guess through what channel they came to Leonardo’s knowledge. Leonardo cannot be regarded as the inventor of that very great variety of truths for which he mentions no earlier source.

The Liber abaci, which fills 459 printed pages, contains the most perfect methods of calculating with whole numbers and with fractions, practice, extraction of the square and cube roots, proportion, chain rule, finding of proportional parts, averages, progressions, even compound interest, just as in the completest mercantile arithmetics of our days. They teach further the solution of problems leading to equations of the first and second degree, to determinate and indeterminate equations, not by single and double position only, but by real algebra, proved by means of geometric constructions, and including the use of letters as symbols for known numbers, the unknown quantity being called res and its square census.

The second work of Leonardo, his Practica geometriae (1220) requires readers already acquainted with Euclid’s planimetry, who are able to follow rigorous demonstrations and feel the necessity for them. Among the contents of this book we simply mention a trigonometrical chapter, in which the words sinus versus arcus occur, the approximate extraction of cube roots shown more at large than in the Liber abaci, and a very curious problem, which nobody would search for in a geometrical work, viz.—To find a square number remaining so after the addition of 5. This problem evidently suggested the first question, viz.—To find a square number which remains a square after the addition and subtraction of 5, put to our mathematician in presence of the emperor by John of Palermo, who, perhaps, was quite enough Leonardo’s friend to set him such problems only as he had himself asked for. Leonardo gave as solution the numbers 1197/144, 1697/144, and 697/144,—the squares of 35/12, 41/12 and 27/12; and the method of finding them is given in the Liber quadratorum. We observe, however, that this kind of problem was not new. Arabian authors already had found three square numbers of equal difference, but the difference itself had not been assigned in proposing the question. Leonardo’s method, therefore, when the difference was a fixed condition of the problem, was necessarily very different from the Arabian, and, in all probability, was his own discovery. The Flos of Leonardo turns on the second question set by John of Palermo, which required the solution of the cubic equation x³ + 2x² + 10x＝20. Leonardo, making use of fractions of the sexagesimal scale, gives x＝1⁰ 22ⁱ 7ⁱⁱ 42ⁱⁱⁱ 33^iv 4^v 40^vi, after having demonstrated, by a discussion founded on the 10th book of Euclid, that a solution by square roots is impossible. It is much to be deplored that Leonardo does not give the least intimation how he found his approximative value, outrunning by this result more than three centuries. Genocchi believes Leonardo to have been in possession of a certain method called regula aurea by H. Cardan in the 16th century, but this is a mere hypothesis without solid foundation. In the Flos equations with negative values of the unknown quantity are also to be met with, and Leonardo perfectly understands the meaning of these negative solutions. In the Letter to Magister Theodore indeterminate problems are chiefly worked, and Leonardo hints at his being able to solve by a general method any problem of this kind not exceeding the first degree.

As for the influence he exercised on posterity, it is enough to say that Luca Pacioli, about 1500, in his celebrated Summa, leans so exclusively to Leonardo’s works (at that time known in manuscript only) that he frankly acknowledges his dependence on them, and states that wherever no other author is quoted all belongs to Leonardus Pisanus.

Fibonacci’s series is a sequence of numbers such that any term is the sum of the two preceding terms; also known as Lamé’s series.  (M. Ca.)