Who is Leonardo Pibonazie?
Favorite Answer
Pisa was an important commercial town in its day and had links with many Mediterranean ports. Leonardo’s father, Guglielmo Bonacci, was a kind of customs officer in the North African town of Bugia now called Bougie where wax candles were exported to France. They are still called “bougies” in French, but the town is a ruin today says D E Smith (see below).
So Leonardo grew up with a North African education under the Moors and later travelled extensively around the Mediterranean coast. He would have met with many merchants and learned of their systems of doing arithmetic. He soon realised the many advantages of the “Hindu-Arabic” system over all the others.
D E Smith points out that another famous Italian – St Francis of Assisi (a nearby Italian town) – was also alive at the same time as Fibonacci: St Francis was born about 1182 (after Fibonacci’s around 1175) and died in 1226 (before Fibonacci’s death commonly assumed to be around 1250).
By the way, don’t confuse Leonardo of Pisa with Leonardo da Vinci! Vinci was just a few miles from Pisa on the way to Florence, but Leonardo da Vinci was born in Vinci in 1452, about 200 years after the death of Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci).
[The portrait here is a link to the University of St Andrew’s site which has more on Fibonacci himself, his life and works.]
His names
Fibonacci
Leonardo of Pisa is now known as Fibonacci [pronounced fib-on-arch-ee] short for filius Bonacci.
There are a couple of explanations for the meaning of Fibonacci:
* Fibonacci is a shortening of the Latin “filius Bonacci”, used in the title of his book Libar Abaci (of which mmore later), which means “the son of Bonaccio”. His father’s name was Guglielmo Bonaccio. Fi’-Bonacci is like the English names of Robin-son and John-son. But (in Italian) Bonacci is also the plural of Bonaccio; therefore, two early writers on Fibonacci (Boncompagni and Milanesi) regard Bonacci as his family name (as in “the Smiths” for the family of John Smith).
Fibonacci himself wrote both “Bonacci” and “Bonaccii” as well as “Bonacij”; the uncertainty in the spelling is partly to be ascribed to this mixture of spoken Italian and written Latin, common at that time. However he did not use the word “Fibonacci”. This seems to have been a nickname probably originating in the works of Guillaume Libri in 1838, accordigng to L E Sigler’s in his Introduction to Leonardo Pisano’s Book of Squares (see Fibonacci’s Mathematical Books below).
* Others think Bonacci may be a kind of nick-name meaning “lucky son” (literally, “son of good fortune”).
Other names
He is perhaps more correctly called Leonardo of Pisa or, using a latinisation of his name, Leonardo Pisano. Occasionally he also wrote Leonardo Bigollo since, in Tuscany, bigollo means a traveller.
We shall just call him Fibonacci as do most modern authors, but if you are looking him up in older books, be prepared to see any of the above variations of his name.
