ABSTRACT
One of the few Europeans who did enough in mathematics during the Middle Ages to be remembered today was Leonardo of Pisa (1175– 1230) also known as Fibonacci, who wrote A Book of Counting in 1202. He described three methods of solving problems, one involving Arabic numerals, one the abacus and the third, finger reckoning. The people of the Middle Ages went in for the latter in a big way, and indeed, solving problems with fingers goes back far beyond the Middle Ages and it is not now generally realised that big numbers could be represented on the fingers. There was a system of finger signs in the same way that there is a system using hand signals for the deaf.
