MAN OF NUMBERS

A sweeping work for a wide general readership that combines compelling intellectual history with a captivating personal detective story. There are obvious comparisons to Brunelleschi's Dome, Longitude, The Riddle of the Compass, The Golden Ratio and many other popular works on the history of ideas.

This is the biography of an enigmatic medieval scholar, Leonardo of Pisa, who was later dubbed "Fibonacci" by a nineteenth century historian and most commonly known for the numeric series which bears that name. It is also the story of his book LIBER ABACI and explains how it introduced arithmetic to the West.

Keith Devlin is a Stanford mathematician and NPR's "math guy". He offers a first-hand record of his quest to uncover the truth about his illustrious and mysterious predecessor. In his book he brings to life one of history's most influential minds, whose own efforts to make math accessible more than eight centuries ago forever changed the way we live.

Over the past few years while researching Fibonacci, Keith has published several small books, including the companion guide to the hit TV series "NUMB3RS", and a short commissioned work, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern.