IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ysm/somwrk/ysm19.html

Fibonacci and the Financial Revolution

Author

Listed:
  • William N. Goetzmann

    (Yale School of Management, International Center for Finance)

Abstract

This paper examines the contribution of Leonardo of Pisa [Fibonacci] to the history of financial mathematics. Evidence in Leonardo's Liber Abaci (1202) suggests that he was the first to develop present value analysis for comparing the economic value of alternative contractual cash flows. He also developed a general method for expressing investment returns, and solved a wide range of complex interest rate problems. The paper argues that his advances in the mathematics of finance were stimulated by the commercial revolution in the Mediterranean during his lifetime, and in turn, his discoveries significantly influenced the evolution of capitalist enterprise and public finance in Europe in the centuries that followed. Fibonacci's discount rates were more culturally influential than his famous series.

Suggested Citation

  • William N. Goetzmann, 2004. "Fibonacci and the Financial Revolution," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm19, Yale School of Management.
    • Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm19
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=461740
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stefan Behringer, 2016. "The Development of the Net Present Value (NPV) Rule ¨C Religious Prohibitions and Its Evolution," Review of Economics & Finance, Better Advances Press, Canada, vol. 6, pages 74-87, August.
    2. Mark Koyama, 2008. "Evading the 'Taint of Usury' Complex Contracts and Segmented Capital Markets," Economics Series Working Papers 412, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    3. Timothy Johnson, 2015. "Reciprocity as a Foundation of Financial Economics," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 131(1), pages 43-67, September.
    4. Sharma, Saurabh & Tomar, Anita & Padaliya, Sanjay Kumar, 2025. "On the evolution and importance of the Fibonacci sequence in visualization of fractals," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    5. Timothy C. Johnson, 2012. "Ethics and Finance: the role of mathematics," Papers 1210.5390, arXiv.org.
    6. Diana A. Filip & Cyrille Piatecki, 2014. "In defense of a non-newtonian economic analysis," Working Papers hal-00945782, HAL.
    7. Balbir S. Sihag, 2017. "Kautilya, Fibonacci and Samuelson on Discounting," Advances in Management and Applied Economics, SCIENPRESS Ltd, vol. 7(2), pages 1-3.
    8. Timothy C. Johnson, 2013. "Reciprocity as the foundation of Financial Economics," Papers 1310.2798, arXiv.org.
    9. Laeven, Luc & Levine, Ross & Michalopoulos, Stelios, 2015. "Financial innovation and endogenous growth," Journal of Financial Intermediation, Elsevier, vol. 24(1), pages 1-24.
    10. Hrvoje Josic & Berislav Zmuk, 2020. "Can Croatian Urban Hierarchy Be Approximated With The Fibonacci Sequence? An Analysis On Historical Population Data," Economic Thought and Practice, Department of Economics and Business, University of Dubrovnik, vol. 29(1), pages 3-28, june.
    11. Fragiskos Archontakis & Evan Osborne, 2007. "Playing It Safe? A Fibonacci Strategy for Soccer Betting," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 8(3), pages 295-308, June.
    12. Mantilla-García, Daniel & García-Huitrón, Manuel E. & Concha-Perdomo, Alvaro & Aldana-Galindo, Julian R., 2023. "Is my pension fund more expensive? Estimating equivalent assets-based and contribution-based management fees," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • B10 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought through 1925 - - - General
    • B31 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - History of Economic Thought: Individuals - - - Individuals

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm19. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/smyalus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.