Finding Fibonacci: The Quest to Rediscover the Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed the World - Hardcover

Devlin, Keith

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691174865 ISBN 13: 9780691174860

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In 2000, Keith Devlin set out to research the life and legacy of the medieval mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, popularly known as Fibonacci, whose book Liber abbaci has quite literally affected the lives of everyone alive today. Although he is most famous for the Fibonacci numbers - which, it so happens, he didn't invent - Fibonacci's greatest contribution was as an expositor of mathematical ideas at a level ordinary people could understand. In 1202, Liber abbaci - the "Book of Calculation" - introduced modern arithmetic to the Western world. Yet Fibonacci was long forgotten after his death, and it was not until the 1960s that his true achievements were finally recognized. Finding Fibonacci is Devlin's compelling firsthand account of his ten-year quest to tell Fibonacci's story. Devlin, a math expositor himself, kept a diary of the undertaking, which he draws on here to describe the project's highs and lows, its false starts and disappointments, the tragedies and unexpected turns, some hilarious episodes, and the occasional lucky breaks.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Keith Devlin is a mathematician at Stanford University and cofounder and president of BrainQuake, an educational technology company that creates mathematics learning video games. His many books include The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter That Made the World Modern. He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio. He lives in Palo Alto, California.

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"A charmingly personal account of Keith Devlin's long quixotic search to understand the man, Leonardo Bonacci, better known as Fibonacci, as well as the thirteenth-century mathematician's surprisingly pervasive influence."--John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and A Numerate Life

"Lovers of history, travel, and mathematics alike will relish this journey through time to ancient worlds, as master expositor Keith Devlin navigates Italy to uncover the beginnings of modern math. Fascinating!"--Danica McKellar, New York Times bestselling author of Math Doesn't Suck

"Though most of us only know about Leonardo of Pisa (aka Fibonacci) because of the numbers named after him, he was in fact the Steve Jobs of the thirteenth century who ushered in a revolution—as we learn from this fascinating book that reads by turns as a detective novel, a moving personal journey, and a meditation on the fate of modernity. Highly recommended to all lovers of math and history."--Edward Frenkel, professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Love and Math

"An unusual and fascinating personal account of a modern mathematician's quest to separate truth from myth and show us the real ‘Fibonacci.'"--Ian Stewart, author of Professor Stewart's Incredible Numbers

"Interesting and engaging. Devlin succeeds in making the reader care about his quest to understand Leonardo the person. He conveys the sense of awe and reverence at holding in your hands a document that has come to you straight from centuries before."--Dana Mackenzie, author of The Universe in Zero Words: The Story of Mathematics as Told through Equations

"[A] good beach read for the nerdier among us."--Math Frolic

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Finding Fibonacci

The Quest to Rediscover the Forgotten Mathematical Genius Who Changed the World

By Keith Devlin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Keith Devlin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17486-0

Contents

PRELUDE Sputnik and Calculus, 
CHAPTER 1 The Flood Plain, 
CHAPTER 2 The Manuscript, 
CHAPTER 3 First Steps, 
CHAPTER 4 The Statue, 
CHAPTER 5 A Walk along the Pisan Riverbank, 
CHAPTER 6 A Very Boring Book?, 
CHAPTER 7 Franci, 
CHAPTER 8 Publishing Fibonacci: From the Cloister to Amazon.com, 
CHAPTER 9 Translation, 
CHAPTER 10 Reading Fibonacci, 
CHAPTER 11 Manuscript Hunting, Part I (Failures), 
CHAPTER 12 Manuscript Hunting, Part II (Success at Last), 
CHAPTER 13 The Missing Link, 
CHAPTER 14 This Will Change the World, 
CHAPTER 15 Leonardo and the Birth of Modern Finance, 
CHAPTER 16 Reflections in a Medieval Mirror, 
APPENDIX Guide to the Chapters of Liber abbaci, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

The Flood Plain

Tuscany, Italy, September 2002. Like many present-day travelers to Pisa, I took the train from Florence — a small commuter train of four carriages pulled by a noisy diesel locomotive, quite different from the sleek Intercity Express that had whisked me southward from Trento. Even late in the season, the train was crammed with tourists, many of them young people carrying backpacks. Everyone was talking loudly to make themselves heard over the noise from the engine. In my carriage I heard Americans, British, Australians, Germans, French, Scandinavians, and Japanese. A port in the Roman era and a major Mediterranean trading hub in medieval times, Pisa clearly is still an international destination, though these days the main cargo seems to be foreign tourists.

Once the train had left Florence behind, the journey became spectacular, winding its way through the beautiful rolling hills of the Chianti wine region. On both sides of the railroad tracks, the steeply rising slopes were covered with an irregular checkerboard of bright green vineyards, each one laid out with geometric precision. Occasionally, a field would stretch right down to the side of the tracks, giving the passengers a closer view. Now, in late summer, the vines were heavy with the ripening purple grapes that would soon be harvested to make the wines the region is so famous for.

Eventually, the hills gave way to a large flat plain, stretching all the way to Pisa and beyond to the sea. There had been heavy rains just prior to my visit to Italy, and as the train left the vineyards it began to rain once again. As the engine slowed down to arrive at our destination, I saw that the land on both sides of the tracks was still under a foot or more of water. The land here floods regularly, a lasting reminder of why Pisa had become a port in the first place: In Roman times, and earlier, this is where Pisa's harbor used to be.

By the time the train pulled up in Pisa, the rain had turned into a sustained, heavy downpour. The small, quaint, inexpensive hotel I had booked via the Internet was perfectly located for sightseeing, right in the center of the old medieval city, close to the river. Unfortunately, the railway station was not — it is a "Central Station" in name only. As I had experienced many times in New York City, when it rains in Pisa, everyone travels by taxi. As a result, the station taxi stand before me stood empty. I waited in line for an hour, with only my umbrella to keep me dry, before I was finally able to secure a ride. I soon began to wish I too had my belongings in a backpack, so I could have walked to my destination, as many of my fellow passengers did. It was a damp end to my journey, both literally and figuratively. Still, I was in Pisa at last, about to take the first step in what would turn out to be a seven-year quest to piece together the story of one of the most influential figures in human history, a medieval mathematician who, over the years, had become something of an obsession with me.

My visit had come about quite by chance. I had been invited to Italy to give an address at an international conference in Rome on the newly emerging field of mathematical cognition. I was asked to give lectures at several other universities as well — the industrial powerhouse of Torino in the northwest, the vacation destination Trento in the mountainous wine region in the northeast, the ancient university town of Bologna partway from Trento to Florence, and the spectacular Siena where, more than 20 years earlier, I had been a visiting professor for several weeks.

I had decided to take a two-day detour to Pisa in between my lecturing commitments in Bologna and Siena, in an effort to find out something about Leonardo Fibonacci, a mysterious thirteenth-century mathematician who apparently played a key role in the making of the modern world, and in whose mathematical footsteps I had, in one important respect, been treading for the past 20 years.

Was there enough information to write a book about him? No one else had written one, so I suspected there was not. On the other hand, that yawning gap in the written history of science meant that Fibonacci was the most famous and accomplished scientist never to have been the subject of a biography. I wanted to give it a try.

My interest was certainly not that of the historian, for such I am not. I am a mathematician. What intrigued me about Leonardo was that significant similarity between our mathematical careers. I sensed a kindred spirit.

As I sheltered under my umbrella, waiting for a taxi, I reflected briefly on how different my mathematical career had been from the future I had envisaged back in 1968, when I completed my bachelor's degree at the University of London and headed off to the University of Bristol to begin work on my doctorate.

Back then, when I was starting out, the only thing I knew about Fibonacci was that he was the mathematician who discovered the famous Fibonacci sequence (he didn't — I was wrong), which I knew had deep connections to human aesthetics (it doesn't — I was wrong). It was much later that I discovered he was one of the most influential men of all time. And that his greatness lay not in his mathematical discoveries — though he was without doubt the strongest mathematician of his time — but rather in his expository power. He had the ability to take what were at the time novel and difficult mathematical ideas and make them accessible to a wide range of people. Moreover, he had the instinct to do it in a way that in present-day terminology would be described as a "good marketing strategy."

As a young graduate student, my role models were not the likes of Leonardo Fibonacci, but the mathematicians who had made major mathematical discoveries — more recent mathematical giants such as Leonard Euler, Karl Friedrich Gauss, Pierre De Fermat, and Kurt Gödel. Like many young people embarking on a mathematical career, I dreamed of joining the ranks of the greatest — of proving a major theorem or solving a difficult problem that had baffled the best minds for decades.

Some of my contemporaries succeeded. In 1963, only a few years ahead of me, the young American mathematician Paul Cohen solved Cantor's Continuum Problem, a puzzle that had resisted all attempts at resolution for more than 60 years. But as is true for the vast majority of mathematicians, eventually I had to settle for far less.

During the course of my career, like most of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691174865
• ISBN 13: 9780691174860
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar