Thursday, May 1, 2014

Déjà vu all over again: Fibonacci and Steve Jobs

This month’s column is the first of a two-part video presentation of a public address I gave recently at Princeton, where I have been spending this semester as a Visiting Professor.

The talk was based on my 2011 e-book Leonardo and Steve, which itself was a supplement to my print book The Man of Numbers, published the same year.

Both the e-book and my presentation show how Jobs’s introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1984 was an almost exact replay of Leonardo of Pisa’s (Fibonacci's) 13th Century introduction to Europe of Hindu-Arabic arithmetic.