Keith Devlin
speaker
76 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2011
last heard Apr 2012
Keith Devlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The genius of Leonardo was...
He knew that in order to sell this method to the business people, he had to present it in their language in a way that made it transparently obvious to them that this was useful to them.
It is full of hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of extremely practical problems.
There's a whole chapter, chapter 10 of Libra Baci, is called On Companies and Their Members.
That's about all the arithmetic you need to know in order to set up and run a company, how to divide up the profits...
how to charge for your goods and so forth.
It was incredibly practical.
Yeah, the one person who wouldn't be surprised would have been Leonardo himself because he really had nothing to do with the damn thing.
As well as doing all these practical problems, every now and then he would throw in a whimsical problem just to sort of lighten the load.
And one of the whimsical problems was a problem about a fictitious rabbit population...
and you have to figure out how many rabbits there are in this population after they've been breeding for a year.
Now, that problem wasn't original to him.
It's just a little throwaway example to give a bit of light relief.
Then in the 19th century, a French mathematician who's looking through Leonardo's work sees this sequence in Liberabaci, knows that this sequence has interesting properties to do with the way flowers and plants grow and that kind of thing, and he gives it a name.
So in the 19th century, it becomes known as the Fibonacci sequence.
That's the only connection between Leonardo and the Fibonacci sequence, I'm afraid.
Showing 61–76 of 76 · page 4 of 4
← Previous