17 March 2011

Devlin has an upcoming biography of Fibonacci

From Keith Devlin's twitter feed (@nprmathguy): he's meeting with his publisher about a biography of Fibonacci which will come out this July, entitled The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution.

What surprises me most about this is that Devlin says that this is the first biography of Fibonacci. The St. Andrews' biographical page on him, for what it's worth, only lists two books among its sources. One is entitled Leonard of Pisa and the New Mathematics of the Middle Ages and the other Leonardi Pisani Liber Abbaci oder Lesevergnügen eines Mathematikers -- these don't sound like biographies. I'm surprised because you'd think there'd be a built-in market for such a book -- everyone knows about the Fibonacci sequence. And you could put bunnies on the cover! It looks as if Devlin's publishers are more serious than I am, though, and have not done so.

1 comment:

Sue VanHattum said...

Devlin's book may be the first biography of Fibonacci written for adults, but there is another biography, which was published just last year. Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, by Joseph D'Agnese, is a picture book.