Leonardo of Pisa and the Liber Abaci. Biographical Elements and the Project of the Work

Abstract

The reconstruction of the educational journey and training of Fibonacci in the 12th century, as well as his career as a teacher, is fraught with difficulties, some of them having to do with the insufficient number of sources. In the historical reconstruction, we offer here, we take as indisputable facts that he had acquired a rich pedagogical experience, which is reflected in his work, the Liber Abaci. Starting with this observation, then our methodological approach will attempt to overcome the dearth of objective information by discovering all we can from a body of relevant clues, which are the milieus in which Fibonacci grew up and where he started out from. We shall draw here from a wide circle of possible elements for comparison, namely those which could better shed light on the very facture of Fibonacci's treatise, focusing particularly on the Preface of his Liber Abaci, of which we offer a translation with commentary based on a newly prepared edition of the text.