Bigollo’s Personal Life
The details of Fibonacci’s childhood and upbringing are almost completely unknown, and what has been deduced has been worked out largely from notes he placed in his own works. There are no contemporary drawings of him, all portraits having been produced after his death.
However, he is thought to have been born in the Italian city of Pisa, the son of a prosperous merchant who may have been the Pisan consul in modern-day Algeria. For this reason, he is often said to have received an education somewhere in northern Africa.
While still a youngster, Bigollo went with his father to assist his commercial and diplomatic operations in the nearby sultanate of Almohad. While he was there, he experienced the use of the system of Hindu-Arabic numerals, at that time almost unknown in the West, where Roman numerals were still the standard. He quickly realized that this new number system would make arithmetical operations far quicker and allow them to be carried out with greater efficiency than the old Roman system.