What is the Fibonacci sequence?

The numbers are named after a 13th-century Italian mathematician known as Leonardo Bonacci. In 1853, historian Guillaume Libri started to refer to him as Fibonacci (son of Bonacci).

In 1202, Fibonacci wrote about these numbers in Liber Abaci. The book was meant to support new ways of doing computation as Europe still used Roman numerals and the abacus to do calculations. He explained the power of the Hindu Arabic numerals, and how the Indians used the numbers 1 to 9 with a revolutionary new concept of 0 in a place number system.

The numbers were discovered by Indian poets and musicians who used them to understand rhythm in music and poetry.

Modern musicians also used the Fibonacci numbers in their work. Debussy used them in his La Mer, Bartok in his Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta. There's a new form of poetry named Fib, where each line has syllables corresponding to the Fibonacci sequence.