10 Facts About Luca Pacioli, The Father Of Modern Accounting
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| Luca Pacioli |
The name Luca Pacioli shouldn't be strange to you if you are an accountant, accounting student or an aspiring accountant. Infact, Luca Pacioli is described as the father of mordern day accounting.
So we are going to be discussing on 10 important facts about the legendary mathematician.
1. Luca Pacioli was born in the year 1447 in Sansepolcro, Republic of Florence and died on June 19, 1517 in Sansepolcro, Republic of Florence. Same place of his birth, he was an Italian mathematician, educator, and friar
2. He received an abbaco education in Sansepolcro. This was education in the vernacular (i.e., the local tongue) rather than Latin and focused on the knowledge required of merchants
3. Luca Pacioli moved to Venice around 1464, where he continued his own education while working as a private tutor to the three sons of a popular merchant named Antonio Rompiasi. During this period, he wrote his first book, a treatise on arithmetic for the boys he was teaching.
4. His father's name was Bartolomeo Pacioli, but Luca Pacioli was said to have lived with the Befolci family while growing up in his birth town Sansepolcro
5. In 1475, Luca Pacioli started teaching in Perugia, he started as a private teacher, from 1477 holding the first chair in mathematics. He wrote a comprehensive textbook in the vernacular for his students.
6. In 1477, Luca started a life of traveling. He spent his time teaching mathematics and especially arithmetic at various universities.
7. Pacioli changed the trend in accounting by describing the double-entry accounting method used in parts of Italy. This revolutionized how businesses oversaw their operations, enabling improved efficiency and profitability. Double entry accounting have remain unchanged for over 500 years.
8. Luca Pacioli was the second person to publish a work on the double-entry system of book-keeping.
9. Pacioli became a Minorite Franciscan friar in 1487, and resumed teaching at Perugia until 1491.
10. He also wrote an unpublished treatise on chess, De ludo scachorum (On the Game of Chess). Long thought to have been lost, a surviving manuscript was rediscovered in 2006, in the 22,000-volume library of Count Guglielmo Coronini
Some of the books written by Luca Pacioli include:
- Tractatus mathematicus ad discipulos perusinos (Ms. Vatican Library, Lat. 3129), a nearly 600-page textbook dedicated to his students at the University of Perugia where Pacioli taught from 1477 to 1480.
- Summa de arithmetica, geometria. Proportioni et proportionalita (Venice149), a textbook for use in the schools of Northern Italy.
- It viribus quantitatis (Ms. Università degli Studi di Bologna, 1496–1508), a treatise on mathematics and magic.
- Geometry (1509), a Latin translation of Euclid's Elements.
- Divina proportione (written in Milan in 1496-98, published in Venice in 1509).
