Even though the printing press had yet to be invented, Fibonacci wrote several books on mathematics that had to be copied by hand. Four of these still survive today. He was probably the most responsible for the rediscovery of ancient Greek mathematics that happened at the time, and in fact he was admired and respected while he was alive, thanks to his application of mathematics for the public good in such areas as astronomy and accounting.
Though he could not have possibly anticipated their significance, he is credited with the discovery of the Fibonacci numbers, the pattern that begins with 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ... and continues by adding the last two numbers produced to produce the next one. The numbers have an intimite relationship with the golden ratio the Greeks so admired, and with the number of steps to completion of Euclid's GCD algorithm.
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