During the centuries in which

the Chinese, Indian and Islamic mathematicians had
been in the ascendancy, Europe had fallen into the Dark
Ages, in which science, mathematics and almost all
intellectual endeavour stagnated.

Scholastic scholars only valued studies in the humanities,

such as philosophy and literature, and spent much of
their energies quarrelling over subtle subjects in
metaphysics and theology, such as “How many angels can stand on the point of
a needle?“

From the 4th to 12th Centuries, European knowledge and study of arithmetic,
geometry, astronomy and music was limited mainly to Boethius’ translations of
some of the works of ancient Greek masters such as Nicomachus and Euclid. All
trade and calculation was made using the clumsy and inefficient Roman numeral
system, and with an abacus based on Greek and Roman models.

By the 12th Century, though, Europe, and particularly Italy, was beginning to trade

with the East, and Eastern knowledge gradually began to spread to the West.
Robert of Chester translated Al-Khwarizmi‘s important book on algebra into Latin
in the 12th Century, and the complete text of Euclid‘s “Elements” was translated in
various versions by Adelard of Bath, Herman of Carinthia and Gerard of Cremona.
The great expansion of trade and commerce in general created a growing practical
need for mathematics, and arithmetic entered much more into the lives of common
people and was no longer limited to the academic realm.

The advent of the printing press in the mid-15th Century also had a huge impact.
Numerous books on arithmetic were published for the purpose of teaching
business people computational methods for their commercial needs and
mathematics gradually began to acquire a more important position in education.

Europe’s first great medieval mathematician was the Italian Leonardo of Pisa,

better known by his nickname Fibonacci. Although best known for the so-called
Fibonacci Sequence of numbers, perhaps his most important contribution to
European mathematics was his role in spreading the use of the Hindu-Arabic
numeral system throughout Europe early in the 13th Century, which soon made
the Roman numeral system obsolete, and opened the way for great advances in
European mathematics.

An important (but largely unknown and underrated)

mathematician and scholar of the 14th Century was the
Frenchman Nicole Oresme. He used a system of
rectangular coordinates centuries before his
countryman René Descartes popularized the idea, as well
as perhaps the first time-speed-distance graph. Also,
leading from his research into musicology, he was the first
to use fractional exponents, and also worked on infinite
series, being the first to prove that the harmonic
series 1⁄1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄3 + 1⁄4 + 1⁄5… is a divergent infinite series (i.e. not tending to a limit,
other than infinity).

The German scholar Regiomontatus was perhaps the most capable mathematician
of the 15th Century, his main contribution to mathematics being in the area of
trigonometry. He helped separate trigonometry from astronomy, and it was largely
through his efforts that trigonometry came to be considered an independent
branch of mathematics. His book “De Triangulis“, in which he described much of
the basic trigonometric knowledge which is now taught in high school and college,
was the first great book on trigonometry to appear in print.

Mention should also be made of Nicholas of Cusa (or Nicolaus Cusanus), a 15th
Century German philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, whose prescient
ideas on the infinite and the infinitesimal directly influenced later mathematicians
like Gottfried Leibniz and Georg Cantor. He also held some distinctly non-
standard intuitive ideas about the universe and the Earth’s position in it, and about
the elliptical orbits of the planets and relative motion, which foreshadowed the
later discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler.

LEONARDO FIBONACCI – ITALIAN

MATHEMATICIAN (WROTE LEBER ABACI) 
The 13th Century Italian Leonardo of Pisa, better known by his nickname
Fibonacci, was perhaps the most talented Western
mathematician of the Middle Ages. Little is known of his
life except that he was the son of a customs offical and,
as a child, he travelled around North Africa with his
father, where he learned about Arabic mathematics. On
his return to Italy, he helped to disseminate this
knowledge throughout Europe, thus setting in motion a
rejuvenation in European mathematics, which had lain
largely dormant for centuries during the Dark Ages.

In particular, in 1202, he wrote a hugely influential book

called “Liber Abaci” (“Book of Calculation”), in which he promoted the use of the
Hindu-Arabic numeral system, describing its many benefits for merchants and
mathematicians alike over the clumsy system of Roman numerals then in use in
Europe. Despite its obvious advantages, uptake of the system in Europe was slow
(this was after all during the time of the Crusades against Islam, a time in which
anything Arabic was viewed with great suspicion), and Arabic numerals were even
banned in the city of Florence in 1299 on the pretext that they were easier to falsify
than Roman numerals. However, common sense eventually prevailed and the new
system was adopted throughout Europe by the 15th century, making
the Roman system obsolete. The horizontal bar notation for fractions was also first
used in this work (although following the Arabic practice of placing the fraction to
the left of the integer).

Fibonacci is best known, though, for his introduction into Europe of a particular
number sequence, which has since become known as Fibonacci Numbers or the
Fibonacci Sequence. He discovered the sequence – the first recursive number
sequence known in Europe – while considering a practical problem in the “Liber
Abaci” involving the growth of a hypothetical population of rabbits based on
idealized assumptions. He noted that, after each monthly generation, the number
of pairs of rabbits increased from 1 to 2 to 3 to 5 to 8 to 13, etc, and identified how
the sequence progressed by adding the previous two terms (in mathematical terms,
Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2), a sequence which could in theory extend indefinitely.
The sequence, which had actually been known to Indian mathematicians since the 6th
Century, has many interesting mathematical properties, and many of the implications and
relationships of the sequence were not discovered until several centuries after Fibonacci’s
death. For instance, the sequence regenerates itself in some surprising ways: every third F-
number is divisible by 2 (F3 = 2), every fourth F-number is divisible by 3 (F4 = 3), every fifth F-
number is divisible by 5 (F5 = 5), every sixth F-number is divisible by 8 (F6 = 8), every seventh
F-number is divisible by 13 (F7 = 13), etc. The numbers of the sequence has also been found
to be ubiquitous in nature: among other things, many species of flowering plants have
numbers of petals in the Fibonacci Sequence; the spiral arrangements of pineapples occur
in 5s and 8s, those of pinecones in 8s and 13s, and the seeds of sunflower heads in 21s,
34s, 55s or even higher terms in the sequence; etc.

The Golden Ratio φ

In the 1750s, Robert Simson noted that the ratio of each term in the Fibonacci Sequence to
the previous term approaches, with ever greater accuracy the higher the terms, a ratio of
approximately 1 : 1.6180339887 (it is actually an irrational number equal to (1 + √5)⁄2 which has
since been calculated to thousands of decimal places). This value is referred to as the
Golden Ratio, also known as the Golden Mean, Golden Section, Divine Proportion, etc, and
is usually denoted by the Greek letter phi φ (or sometimes the capital letter Phi Φ).
Essentially, two quantities are in the Golden Ratio if the ratio of the sum of the quantities to
the larger quantity is equal to the ratio of the larger quantity to the smaller one. The
Golden Ratio itself has many unique properties, such as 1⁄φ = φ – 1 (0.618…) and φ2 = φ + 1
(2.618…), and there are countless examples of it to be found both in nature and in the
human world.

A rectangle with sides in the ratio of 1 : φ is known as a Golden Rectangle, and

many artists and architects throughout history (dating back to
ancient Egypt and Greece, but particularly popular in the Renaissance art of
Leonardo da Vinci and his contemporaries) have proportioned their works
approximately using the Golden Ratio and Golden Rectangles, which are widely
considered to be innately aesthetically pleasing. An arc connecting opposite points
of ever smaller nested Golden Rectangles forms a logarithmic spiral, known as a
Golden Spiral. The Golden Ratio and Golden Spiral can also be found in a surprising
number of instances in Nature, from shells to flowers to animal horns to human
bodies to storm systems to complete galaxies.

It should be remembered, though, that the Fibonacci Sequence was actually only a
very minor element in “Liber Abaci” – indeed, the sequence only received
Fibonacci’s name in 1877 when Eduouard Lucas decided to pay tribute to him by
naming the series after him – and that Fibonacci himself was not responsible for
identifying any of the interesting
mathematical properties of the
sequence, its relationship to the
Golden Mean and Golden
Rectangles and Spirals, etc.

Lattice
Multiplication
However, the book’s influence on
medieval mathematics is
undeniable, and it does also
include discussions of a number of
other mathematical problems such
as the Chinese Remainder Theorem, perfect numbers and prime numbers, formulas for
arithmetic series and for square pyramidal numbers, Euclidean geometric proofs, and a
study of simultaneous linear equations along the lines of Diophantus and Al-Karaji. He
also described the lattice (or sieve) multiplication method of multiplying large numbers, a
method – originally pioneered by Islamic mathematicians like Al-Khwarizmi –
algorithmically equivalent to long multiplication.

Neither was “Liber Abaci” Fibonacci’s only book, although it was his most important one.
His “Liber Quadratorum” (“The Book of Squares”), for example, is a book on algebra,
published in 1225 in which appears a statement of what is now called Fibonacci’s identity –
sometimes also known as Brahmagupta’s identity after the much
earlier Indian mathematician who also came to the same conclusions – that the product of
two sums of two squares is itself a sum of two squares e.g. (12 + 42)(22 + 72) = 262 + 152 =
302 + 12.

16TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS

The cultural, intellectual and artistic movement of the Renaissance, which saw a
resurgence of learning based on classical sources, began in Italy around the 14th Century,
and gradually spread across most of Europe over the next two centuries. Science and art
were still very much interconnected and intermingled at this time, as exemplified by the
work of artist/scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, and it is no surprise that, just as in art,
revolutionary work in the fields of philosophy and science was soon taking place.

The Supermagic Square 

It is a tribute to the respect in which mathematics was held in Renaissance Europe

that the famed German artist Albrecht Dürer included an order-4 magic square in
his engraving “Melencolia I“. In fact, it is a so-called “super magic square” with
many more lines of addition symmetry than a regular 4 x 4 magic square (see
image at right). The year of the work, 1514, is shown in the two bottom central
squares.
An important figure in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries is an Italian Franciscan
friar called Luca Pacioli, who published a book on arithmetic, geometry and book-
keeping at the end of the 15th Century which became quite popular for the
mathematical puzzles it contained. It also introduced symbols for plus and minus
for the first time in a printed book (although this is also sometimes attributed to
Giel Vander Hoecke, Johannes Widmann and others), symbols that were to become
standard notation. Pacioli also investigated the Golden Ratio of 1 : 1.618… (see the
section on Fibonacci) in his 1509 book “The Divine Proportion”, concluding that the
number was a message from God and a source of secret knowledge about the
inner beauty of things.
The supermagic square shown in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “Melencolia I”

During the 16th and early 17th Century, the equals, multiplication, division, radical (root),
decimal and inequality symbols were gradually introduced and standardized. The use of
decimal fractions and decimal arithmetic is usually attributed to the Flemish mathematician
Simon Stevin the late 16th Century, although the decimal point notation was not
popularized until early in the 17th Century. Stevin was ahead of his time in enjoining that
all types of numbers, whether fractions, negatives, real numbers or surds (such as √2)
should be treated equally as numbers in their own right.

In the Renaissance Italy of the early 16th Century, Bologna University in particular
was famed for its intense public mathematics competitions. It was in just such a
competion that the unlikely figure of the young, self-taught Niccolò Fontana
Tartaglia revealed to the world the formula for solving first one type, and later all
types, of cubic equations (equations with terms including x3), an achievement
hitherto considered impossible and which had stumped the best mathematicians
of China, India and the Islamic world.

Building on Tartaglia’s work, another young Italian, Lodovico Ferrari, soon devised

a similar method to solve quartic equations (equations with terms including x4) and
both solutions were published by Gerolamo Cardano. Despite a decade-long fight
over the publication, Tartaglia, Cardano and Ferrari between them demonstrated
the first uses of what are now known as complex numbers, combinations of real
and imaginary numbers (although it fell to another Bologna resident, Rafael
Bombelli, to explain what imaginary numbers really were and how they could be
used). Tartaglia went on to produce other important (although largely ignored)
formulas and methods, and Cardano published perhaps the first systematic
treatment of probability.

With Hindu-Arabic numerals, standardized notation and the new language of algebra at
their disposal, the stage was set for the European mathematical revolution of the 17th
Century.