At the end of the XII century, Guglielmo of the Bonacci family, notary of the city of Pisa, took with him his son Leonardo to the city of Bugia in the Maghreb, and there sent him to learn arithmetic and the abacus. For the young Leonardo this meant the discovery of his vocation, to which he dedicated the rest of his life. Having learnt all the mathematics he could during many journeys - from which he probably received the surname of Bigollo - in all the Arab Mediterranean world, upon his return to Pisa Leonardo Fibonacci transferred it in a series of works, that for several centuries were without pair in the Christian West: wider and more elementary the Liber Abaci and the Practica geometriae, more concise and advanced the Flos, the Liber quadratorum and the Epistola ad Magistrum Theodorum.

Eight centuries after the first appearance of the Liber Abaci (1202), the work of Fibonacci will be celebrated with an international conference and an exhibition, to be held in Pisa, where he was born, and in Florence, the city in which, more than everywhere else, the influence of Leonardo was sensible.

In this occasion it is also born the exhibition

A bridge over the Mediterranean
Leonardo Pisano, the Arabic science and the renaissance of Mathematics in the West

with its first staging in Pisa, Church of S. Paolo all'Orto, 20 November 2002 - 20 January 2003.

The exhibition is composed by about forty illustrated panels (150x280x5 cm), some shaped panels, about thirty works among which some handwritten reproductions of Fibonacci's works, other texts of medieval mathematics, publications and studies of the nineteenth century about Fibonacci and a plastic model reproducing the dislocation of the abacus' schools in the Florence of the late Middle Ages.

To the exhibition is associated a catalogue illustrating the contents of the exhibition in an articulated way.
A CD-rom containing the works and the studies on Fibonacci of the ninth century has been also realized.

The Garden of Archimedes offers also a memorial medal, realized by the sculptor Antonio Fascetti.

• virtual visit
• stagings
• catalogue (available in Italian only)
• CD-rom
• medal of Fibonacci