Liber Abaci
Author: Leonardo "Fibonacci" da Pisa
Self-published A.D. MCCII
Europe has been blighted with another sacreligious tome from Tuscany. This seditious script was produced by Leonardo da Pisa, filius Bonacci. He aptly calls himself Bigollo, which literally means traveller but more aptly translates to "good-for-nothing" in this case. God-fearing Christians will find no choice but to shun this text which attempts no less than to supplant the noble Roman numeral system which has served Europeans so well for almost MM years.
Leonardo's honourable father, Guglielmo Bonacci, is a respected civil servant. While serving his home city of Pisa among the Moorish merchants of the Barbary coast, his son was subjected to the confounding codes of calculation used by the Muslim world, which were in point of fact stolen from the polytheistic tribes to the east of them, the farthest lands conquered by Alexander the Great.
Having been schooled beyond the years of his childhood and still not adopted the profession chosen for him by his father, this Leonardo write over DC pages to argue the point that X symbols should be employed to describe numbers that are already described so practically with VII. He could have stopped at IX symbols had he not insisted on adding a meaningless symbol that says nothing. Do we need circles to say nothing?
Here is the so-called Arabic numeral system described for the reader:
1 - I (well, at least the heathens can count to one properly)
2 - II
3 - III
4 - IV
5 - V
6 - VI
7 - VII
8 - VIII
9 - IX
0 - nothing!
So now the carvers of stone tablets must learn to chip new curved symbols? What an impractical proposition! Let's remember how simple we have it now:
I - one
V - five
X - ten
L - fifty
C - one hundred
D - five hundred
M - one thousand
The only complementary point to be made about the Arabic numerals is that they are based on the multiples of ten, unlike the Babylonians with their multiples of LX. Shall we have a numeric alphabet of LX symbols, anyone?
Leonard proposes that larger numbers be represented with all ten symbols employed in decreasing order as the Roman numbers are at heart. For example ten is not the simple X but 10 to mean 1 set of ten added to nothing. The reader can see how laborious this approach will be already. Twenty, instead of being written XX is to be 20 and so on. One hundred would no longer be C but 100.
The cunning argument "Fibonacci" makes is that calculations will be easier if we change our whole method of doing business. His claim is that addition, subtraction and even multiplication and division are simpler using the Arabic system when compared to the Roman numeral system that has served us so well. Firstly, there is no proof that the Roman numerals are to blame for the comparatively slower European clerks and scholars. It could equally be explained by the shorter winter days in our northern climate giving them fewer daylight hours in which to work. Even if it were agreed that the Roman numerals are more difficult to use in arithmetic, it would be a severe burden on business to make them learn new ways and this would make them less competitive. As a matter of principle we cannot impose burdens on our merchants to make them less competitive in the Mediterranean market, even if the burden is short-term.
It is not enough that Fibonacci describe the use of foreign numbers, he must give puzzles that are solved with the method. Take, for example, the puzzle of the procreating rabbits. He asks how many fornicating furballs you will have at the end of the year if you start with a pair and feed them without taking any of the progeny to market. Simple: you will have a plague of rabbits. But Bigollo is not satisfied with a practical answer, he goes on to describe how brother and sister rabbit must be fruitful and multiply together, against God's will. He finds the number of the beastly plan: CCXXXIII pairs. One might have expected DCLXVI from such a scheme.
I call upon all good Christians of Europe to reject the calculating plans of Leonard "Fibonacci" da Pisa. Let us not be "surrender monkeys"! As surely as the world is flat (for some have suggested we are round as the bodies in the heavens), the "algebra" of the Moors will come to naught.
