The Ultimate Ot Question: How Big Is Your Dic

[ryyannon]

They all had big dictionaries?

[Pugwash]

Nice try. Again?

First names apart from Euclid.

By the way, my Dic is so big I need a shelf to keep it off the floor.

[ryyannon]

The missing piece is, they're all FIRST names of obscure mathematicians. It's a strange lot of boys I work with.

So, actually the common "Leonardo" won't work but there's a far more obscure "Leonardo" that will. Can anyone name him?

Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1250)

Accomplishments

He published a book called Liber Abaci.

In 1202 he published the first of his four books, Liber Abaci, it used the Hindu-Arabic numbering system, introducing the Indian numbers 1 through 9 and zero to a European audience. In his book you can tell that he was influenced by the Muslim and Arab culture, because he wrote many things from right to left. In his book he wrote the numerals in descending order and his fractions came before the numeral like ½ 4 instead of 4 ½.

This sequence soon became known as the Fibonacci Sequence

Fibonacci's Rabbits

Originally this was a problem that he investigated (in the year 1202) to see about how fast rabbits would breed in ideal circumstances. This is assumming that none of the rabbits die, and that each pair of rabbits does not give birth to more than one pair of rabbits each month. The picture below shows a pair of rabbits that are born, and they don't mature until after the first month. Then they give birth to a pair of rabbits, and they don't mature until after the first month. It repeats like that forever. If you look at the numbers at the right in the chart, it shows the number of rabbits that are alive at the time, and those same numbers are also part of the Fibonacci Sequence. That is how he discovered the sequence.

Below is one of the ways of calculating Fibonacci Numbers.

Fibonacci Numbers, represented here by Fi, can be defined as follows.

Let F0=0 and F1=1. For all other Fi, let Fn+1 = Fn-1 + Fn.

Effects

His introduction of the Arabian Numerals gave the Europeans an easier way to do calculations. Since using Roman Numerals were harder to use because of so many letters that represent numbers in different ways.

It also caused some of the people many years after he made the discovery to create a society in his name. The Fibonacci Society was founded in 1962, and a journal, The Fibonacci Quarterly, first appeared in 1963, and was dedicated to unraveling its secrets. There were a lot of secrets to be found.

[Pugwash]

Euclid counts as a first name since he was known as Euclid of Alexandria.

To have a first name, you need a second. Otherwise all you have is a name.