[00:00.30]
[00:00.31]Struggle to do business with seven different forms of coinage in circulation,
[00:04.57]even the simplest transaction could be a headache, requiring the use of an abacus.
[00:09.50]By comparison, economic life in the eastern world in the Muslim caliphate or the Song Chinese Empire was far more advanced
[00:18.17]To discover modern finance, backward Europe needed to import it
[00:26.05]Enter a young mathematician called Leonardo of Pisa or Fibonacci
[00:31.69]The son of a Pisan Customs Official based in what is now Algeria
[00:35.84]Fibonacci is best remembered today for his sequence of numbers that mimic the properties of nature
[00:44.42]But the famous sequence was only one of many Eastern mathematical ideas
[00:49.58]that Fibonacci introduced to Europe with his path-breaking book the Liber Abaci - The Book of Calculation.
[00:55.86]Even more important was his demonstration of the superiority of Arabic numerals over Roman numerals
[01:02.50]And crucially, nearly all Fibonacci's examples related to business
[01:07.68]