Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, many far-reaching changes in the social, political, and intellectual lives of people and nations were taking place. Europe had emerged from the period of barbarian invasions and disruptions known as the Dark Ages. Improved techniques in farming had led to greater food production, population growth, and commercial expansion which were to pave the way for the industrial, scientific, and technological progress of later centuries. Contacts with Eastern civilizations were made by the Crusaders, by curious travelers, and by merchants looking for trading opportunities. Into this world of change, in 1170 AD, a man was born who would forever be remembered as one of the greatest mathematicians of the Middle Ages - Leonardo da Pisa, who later became known as Leonardo Fibonacci. While his contributions to the world of mathematics are all quiet extraordinary, he is best known as the discoverer of a sequence, named the Fibonacci Sequence, which showed that no matter how random this world may seem there is underlying order to it and the most ¡°natural¡± events can be, in fact, modeled with mathematical equations. Of course, attempting to find a perfect equation, thus a perfect solution, for the un