Another great article from Wiki. I am immersing myself in puzzles and riddles now and will have some to post in the near future. Keep checking back.

The earliest known reference to Fibonacci numbers is contained in a book on meters by an Indian mathematician named Pingala called Chhandah-shastra (500 BC). As documented by Donald Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, this sequence was described by the Indian mathematicians Gopala and Hemachandra in 1150, who were investigating the possible ways of exactly bin packing items of length 1 and 2. In the West, it was first studied by Leonardo of Pisa, who was also known as Fibonacci (c. 1200), to describe the growth of an idealised (although biologically unrealistic) rabbit population. The numbers describe the number of pairs in the rabbit population after n months if it is assumed that:

• in the first month there is just one newly-born pair,
• new-born pairs become fertile from their second month on
• each month every fertile pair begets a new pair, and
• the rabbits never die

Suppose that in month n we have a pairs of fertile and newly born rabbits and in month n + 1 we have b pairs. In month n + 2 we will necessarily have a + b pairs, because all a pairs of rabbits from month n will be fertile and produce a pairs of offspring, while the newly born rabbits in b will not be fertile and will not produce offspring.

With the upcoming release of The DaVinci Code I have been doing some research online and have found that the Wiki Online Encyclopedia is a great resource. Here is a great piece on Da Vinci..

Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and as impressive and innovative as Leonardo's artistic work are his studies in science and engineering, recorded in notebooks comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and science. These notes were made and maintained through Leonardo's travels through Europe, during which he made continual observations of the world around him. He was left-handed and used mirror writing throughout his life. This is explainable by the fact that it is easier to pull a quill pen than to push it; by using mirror-writing, the left-handed writer is able to pull the pen from right to left.

His approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanations. Throughout his life, he planned a grand encyclopedia based on detailed drawings of everything. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist.