Fibonacci's Real Mathematical Legacy

“Mathematician Laurence Sigler had made it his mission to translate [Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci], rushing to complete the task right before he died of lymphocytic leukemia in 1997. But his editor moved on, and the manuscript languished on floppy disks for years. For a while Sigler’s widow Judith Sigler Fell, fearing the project would be killed, took the extraordinary step of impersonating her husband in communiqués.

By the time Fell found a new publisher, Springer Verlag (now part of the same publisher as Nature), floppy disks had been superseded and she had to hire a hacker to extract the files. Fell then discovered that Springer only accepted submissions in TEX format, the technical standard for physics and mathematics texts. She learned it and spent six months retyping the text. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci was finally published in 2002 — the 800th anniversary of the book’s first appearance.”

Possibly even earlier. This is not developed further because the article is about Leonardo.

Pingala's is perhaps the first recorded conception of the sequence. It showed up in his study of metre and rhythm of poetry. The problem he was trying to solve was to enumerate how many ways can an integral period of time be broken up into pieces of unit and double unit length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_sequence#History

If you are a drummer I think this will make a lot of sense.

Pingala is also known for his use of binary numbers, 'Pascal's' triangle, recursive generation of strings from context free grammars. Full formalization of Sanskrit grammar as a context free grammar goes to Panini (possibly his brother).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingala

I've often wondered about how school curricula evolve over time. Presumably people were doing _something_ in 13th century math classes? What were they doing? How soon did we end up incorporating modern number representation into elementary school?

Something like calculus was cutting edge when Newton and Leibnitz were around, now it's what people learn in high school.

Are there things that we currently consider to be new and exciting that in a few years will be taught to every student? What will drop out?