Reference to Engels at end.
Chris Burford
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I must share a few highlights from an excellent Open University programme I caught on BBC 2 this morning covering 1500 years of interchange of arithmetical skills between India where the numberical system was first used 100 present era (Brahmi) to the Arab traders after the rise of Islam. A key figure was Leonardo of Pisa, now famous for his calculation of the Fibonacci numbers. Here is a Google clip on him as "Leonardo Fibonacci".
Fibonacci was born in Italy but was educated in North Africa where his father, Guilielmo, held a diplomatic post. His father's job was to represent the merchants of the Republic of Pisa who were trading in Bugia, later called Bougie and now called Bejaia. Bejaia is a Mediterranean port in northeastern Algeria. The town lies at the mouth of the Wadi Soummam near Mount Gouraya and Cape Carbon. Fibonacci was taught mathematics in Bugia and travelled widely with his father, recognising and the enormous advantages of the mathematical systems used in the countries they visited. Fibonacci writes in his famous book Liber abaci (1202):-
When my father, who had been appointed by his country as public notary in the customs at Bugia acting for the Pisan merchants going there, was in charge, he summoned me to him while I was still a child, and having an eye to usefulness and future convenience, desired me to stay there and receive instruction in the school of accounting. There, when I had been introduced to the art of the Indians' nine symbols through remarkable teaching, knowledge of the art very soon pleased me above all else and I came to understand it, for whatever was studied by the art in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily and Provence, in all its various forms.
All told, the programme by Graham Flegg, was an excellent integration of knowledge of economic developments and arithmetic over 3 continents and 1 1/2 millenia. It was fully in accord with a historical materialist perspective. It is consistent with observations by Engels about the revolutionary role of merchant capital.
