But unfortunately, that very same day, during that very same 10 minutes, he started to get bored with just sitting down so he looked outside and counted the birds on a tree and wondered how many bird legs and bird wings were on the tree and if each bird sung for a certain amount of time and each bird sang one after another, how long would it take for them to finish their concert? But when his math teacher caught him daydreaming, she angrily shouted at him and called him a "blockhead". That's where it all started.
Later, when he was thinking about the same sort of stuff near a construction site, someone else called him a blockhead then too! That evening Fibonacci's dad was angry; he had heard about the whole blockhead thing and was furious that people thought his son was an idiot. He said that he would leave on a trip with Fibonacci to Africa and hope that the whole idea of "blockhead Fibonacci" would be gone by the time they returned home to Pisa.
While on his trip to Africa he learns even more stuff about math; he learns different number systems and also has a chance to practice some of his measurement skills in Turkey and Syria. He learned geometry when he went to Greece and when he went to Sicily his subtraction and division skills got a workout.
He decided to write a book about Hindu/Arabic numerals, which are the numbers most people use today. Back then they used Roman numerals more. He decided to throw some riddles into this book and one of the riddles led to his discovery the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence is a pattern; it can be described in a picture or a sequence of numbers. The sequence of numbers is 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on. The way it is created is by starting with 1 and adding the number before it (so 0) onto that 1 and doing the same for the other numbers: add the number before it to the present number to make the next one in the pattern.
The significant thing about this pattern is that it appears all the time in nature. For example, the pattern of the seeds of a sunflower or a pine cone happens to be the Fibonacci sequence. Even after he discovered this though, he was still called a blockhead when he got home. He only seemed to become famous after his death, but he got used to the whole blockhead thing as he got older.
I think that this book was pretty fun and I learned a whole lot from it. The only problem it seems to have is that some parts of it are kind of hard to understand--it doesn't seem as organized and there seems to be a lot of junk in it too, like the parts near the end of it didn't seem to be too important and I think they should have had more about the actual Fibonacci sequence in the book.
The example in another book I've read called "Penrose the Mathematical Cat" (I'll do a review of that when I finish it) is much clearer and a lot more detailed. It is easier to understand even though it doesn't tell about Fibonacci's life.
"Blockhead" shows the actual pattern unclearly to me--I think that it's pretty important to talk about the sequence if you want to understand his life.
