ABSTRACT
The Middle Ages, sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, were indeed dark for mathematics. However, there was some light and there, and the leading light was to be found in Italy, under the name Leonardo of Pisa. Today he is better known as Fibonacci, an abbreviated form of Filius Bonacci, meaning son of Bonacci. In the third section of Liber Abaci, published in 1202, Fibonacci introduced and solved a problem that led to what we call the Fibonacci sequence. The problem is inefficiently expressed from perspective, but it can be summarized as follows. Approaching problems with recursion is a technique that goes back to the ancient world. Coincidentally, it was being explored in China at about the same time Fibonacci was active in Italy. Qin Jiushao, for example, used a recursive method to approximate solutions to polynomials.
