Full video about this book is up on my YouTube channel called "Fibonacci slop is out of control" #math #historyofmath #fibonacci

This is the most influential math book that almost no one has read, not even mathematicians. Among expert mathematicians, the desire to read this book is very low, despite it giving us the mathematical world we know today. It's responsible for the Western world adopting the Hindu Arabic number system. It laid the foundation for modern colours and economics, and its author is very famous, at least by name. This book is 'Libra Abaki' written by Fibonacci in 1202. The reason no one bothers to read this book is because it teaches the basic concept of our modern number system to people who weren't familiar with it at all. In excruciating detail, Fibonacci describes how the place value system works, how to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers. Because he's explaining it to people who previous to this were using Roman numerals. We can skim through it and appreciate how this book changed the world. Fibonacci had spent time travelling through countries that used the Hindu Arabic number system, and with this book he brought that knowledge home to share with merchants in Italy. His examples cover all aspects of trading and splitting finances, such as what to do when four men find a purse full of coins. There's also his famous rabbit problem, the reason the Fibonacci sequence of numbers is named after him. There was no English translation of this book for 800 years, but even now that one exists, it's almost impossible to sit down and fully read it. Even children today are so familiar with numbers and how they work that we don't need to read 600 pages about them. If you want to learn arithmetic now, we have much better and easier techniques than those that are described here. So even though you don't need to read this book to become a great mathematician, without it, modern math might look very different.