Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci

Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci is a picture-book biography of Leonardo Fibonacci, the medieval Italian mathematician whose name is attached to the number sequence found throughout nature. As a boy in medieval Italy, Leonardo thought about numbers day and night and was teased for daydreaming, so people called him a blockhead. When he grew up and travelled the world, he was inspired by the numerals used in other countries, and he noticed that many things - the petals on a flower, the spiral of a nautilus shell - seem to follow a particular pattern. The book tells how the boy who was once teased became the man who described the Fibonacci sequence, and John O'Brien's textured illustrations hide spirals and sequence numbers for readers to find. It was a 2011 Bank Street Best Children's Book of the Year.