How the world's first business bestseller transformed the world

"He had the journalistic gift of making the strange seem commonplace and the tangential seem relevant. By posing real-life examples of conundrums faced by traders, Fibonacci brought maths to life. Had he written in the language of the academy, the book would have had limited relevance. But because he wrote it for the merchants, Fibonacci revealed the true genius of the great teacher: an ability to escape from the tyranny of his peer group."

"Liber Abaci became the go-to book for traders and an essential tool of international commerce. It could be regarded as the first bestselling business book. Revelatory as well as revolutionary, it explained how to calculate interest rates, how to circumvent the Church's usury laws, apportion profits, and assess revenues and costs. It gave merchants a roadmap to express their produce in terms of someone else's products, in fractions and in a common currency."

In 1202 Leonardo of Pisa learned North African algebraic techniques and published Liber Abaci, which introduced practical calculation methods to European commerce. Liber Abaci taught merchants algebraic principles for calculating interest, apportioning profits, assessing revenues and costs, and expressing produce in common currency and fractions. The book used real trade problems and puzzles about interest, banks, and usury to demonstrate applications. By targeting merchants rather than scholarly monks, it bypassed academic gatekeepers and reached practical users. Liber Abaci became widely used across international trade and functioned as an essential commercial handbook and early business bestseller.

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