Leonardo Pisano, also known as Fibonacci ( for filius Bonacci , meaning son of Bonacci ), was an Italian mathematician who lived from 1170 - 1250. Fibonacci is sometimes called the greatest European mathematician of the middle ages.
As a boy, Fibonacci traveled, with his father, to North Africa, where he learned the Arabic numeral system. Subsequently, Fibonacci studied under leading Arabic mathematicians. Fibonacci is best known for introducing mathematical concepts he learned in the Middle East to the Western world, including the decimal system and the Fibonacci sequence , a series of numbers beginning with zero or one and proceeding in such a manner that each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers.