| [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] |
|
