Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years
    Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years
    Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years

    By Keith Devlin

    4.5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In this short e-book (about 14,000 words), Stanford mathematician and NPR's "Math Guy" Keith Devlin Ph.D. presents the fascinating similarities between 13th Century mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, more commonly known as Fibonacci, and Steve Jobs, the 20th Century founder of Apple computers.

    In 1202, 32-year old Italian Leonardo of Pisa finished one of the most influential books of all time, which introduced modern arithmetic to Western Europe. Devised in India in the 7th and 8th centuries and brought to North Africa by Muslim traders, the Hindu-Arabic system helped transform the West into the dominant force in science, technology, and commerce, leaving behind Muslim cultures which had long known it but had failed to see its potential. Leonardo had learned the Hindu number system when he traveled to North Africa with his father, a customs agent. The book he created was Liber Abbaci, the "Book of Calculation," and the revolution that followed its publication was enormous. Arithmetic made it possible for ordinary people to buy and sell goods, convert currencies, and keep accurate records of possessions more readily than ever before. Liber Abbaci's publication led directly to large-scale international commerce and the scientific revolution of the Renaissance.

    In "Leonardo & Steve," Devlin shows the uncanny parallels between Leonardo's arithmetic revolution that took place in Tuscany in the Thirteenth Century and the one that began in California's Silicon Valley in more recent times. It is a story about the personal computing revolution that occurred in the 1980s, but with the novel twist that it was actually history repeating itself.

    Also included is a special preview, the first chapter of Keith Devlin's book "Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution" (Walker/Bloomsbury).

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKeith Devlin
    Release dateJul 7, 2011
    ISBN9781452407593
    Leonardo and Steve: The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years
    Author

    Keith Devlin

    Dr. Keith Devlin is a mathematician at Stanford University in California. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He has written 31 books and over 80 published research articles. His books have been awarded the Pythagoras Prize and the Peano Prize, and his writing has earned him the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. In 2003, he was recognized by the California State Assembly for his "innovative work and longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and linguistics." He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio. (Archived at http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/MathGuy.html.) He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He writes a monthly column for the Mathematical Association of America, "Devlin's Angle": http://www.maa.org/devlin/devangle.html

    Read more from Keith Devlin

    Related to Leonardo and Steve

    Related ebooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    Related categories

    Reviews for Leonardo and Steve

    4.5/5

    4 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Leonardo and Steve - Keith Devlin

      Leonardo and Steve:

      The Young Genius Who Beat Apple to Market by 800 Years

      by Keith Devlin, Ph.D.

      Smashwords edition

      Copyright 2011 Keith Devlin

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For more information, contact Keith Devlin at http://www.stanford.edu/~kdevlin/

      ISBN 978-1-4524-0759-3

      Table of Contents

      Prelude: The Statue

      Chapter One: WYSIWYG and WIMPS

      Chapter Two: Game Changer

      Chapter Three: Right Time, Right Place

      Chapter Four: The Book of Calculation

      Chapter Five: The Revolution

      Chapter Six: The Secrets of Their Success

      Chapter Seven: The Visionary Is Forgotten

      Chapter Eight: Doubts Set In

      Chapter Nine: Unraveling the Thread

      Chapter Ten: The Final Piece of the Puzzle

      Chapter Eleven: The Key to Success

      Chapter Twelve: Parallel Lines

      Chapter Thirteen: Parallel Lines Never Meet

      Chapter Fourteen: A Lens to the Past

      References

      Preview - The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution

      Prelude: The Statue

      Toward the end of the Second World War, American and German troops faced one another from opposite sides of the River Arno in the center of the Italian city of Pisa. After a month-long battle, the bridge that connected the two banks, the Ponte di Mezzo (Central Bridge), was left destroyed, as were most of the buildings on either side. Yet remarkably, amidst all the rubble, there remained standing a white marble statue of a man. Barely scratched, apart from the loss of the ends of some fingers, it had been the centerpiece of the Piazza XX Settembre (20th September Square), an elegant square at the southern end of the bridge.

      The sculpture, which is now on display in the in the Piazza dei Miracoli near the Leaning Tower of Pisa, depicts a thirteenth-century Pisan mathematician named Leonardo, better known today by the modern nickname of Fibonacci. Who was this Leonardo, and why did the citizens of Pisa see fit to grace one of their most prominent piazzas with his likeness? (Actually, almost certainly not his likeness, but the artistic creation of the nineteenth-century sculptor who crafted it.)

      While Leonardo is most commonly associated with a simple numerical sequence (the Fibonacci numbers), it was his more relevant and deserving stature as the world’s most prominent mathematician during the thirteenth century that earned him the honor of memorialization in stone. He was the author of a number of highly influential mathematics texts, in particular Liber Abbaci (The Book of Calculation), the first arithmetic textbook in Europe.

      What was not known at the time the statue was completed in 1863 was that Leonardo was also the instigator of the world’s first wide-scale personal computing revolution, beating Apple’s first Macintosh computer to market by eight hundred years. (It’s reasonable to take the release of the Macintosh in 1984 as the start of the modern personal computing revolution, since that was when personal computers—operated using a mouse and keyboard, with a windowed screen that looks like a paper document on a desktop—became available to ordinary people. More on this choice later.)

      In my book The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution, I describe the contents of Liber Abbaci, recount the story of how Leonardo came to write it, and trace the enormous influence it had on the development of modern society. In focusing on the historical story, what I left out of that account are the uncanny parallels between the personal computing revolution that took place in Tuscany in the thirteenth century and the one that began in California’s Silicon Valley in more recent times. This is the story I will tell in these pages. For through the eyes of the present, we can come to understand something of the past; and conversely, by reflecting on the past, we can better appreciate events that take place in our own time.

      tmp_edcc02a6f52f6fdc3e28942383ed02d7_9obUcT_html_39507532.jpg

      Caption: Leonardo’s statue at the end of the Second World War, photographer unknown. This amazing photograph was published in the magazine Pisa Economica, Pisan Chamber of Commerce, 1977.

      Chapter One: WYSIWYG and WIMPS

      In December 1979, a boyish-looking young man with a short, wispy beard and long, flowing, black hair paid a visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His name was Steven P. Jobs. Xerox PARC, located just a few miles to the north of Cupertino, the Californian suburb where Jobs grew up, was already famous among the high-tech crowd that had been gravitating toward the Palo Alto region for the past decade. Though the rest of the world would not know it for another five years, PARC’s hundred or so computer engineers and designers—recruited from the word's top talent—had been secretly developing most of the components of modern personal computing, including the windows-mouse-pointer system for displaying files and navigating through the computer’s memory, the ethernet, the laser printer,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1