Luca Pacioli

Timeline

1. c. 1447–1493Sansepolcro · SansepolcroHe grew up in Sansepolcro, joined the Franciscans, and became familiar with practical calculation in a Venetian merchant milieu. From 1475 he taught mathematics professionally in Perugia and elsewhere, obtaining a mathematics chair at Perugia in 1477 and writing lecture notes in Italian for students. This itinerant teaching prepared the material for his later printed compendium of commercial arithmetic, algebra, and geometry.
2. 1494Venice · VeniceIn 1494, Paganino Paganini printed his Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita in Venice. Aimed at schools and merchants of northern Italy in the Italian vernacular, the work gathered arithmetic, elementary algebra, and geometry; its special treatise Particularis de computis et scripturis first systematized Venetian double-entry bookkeeping in print, becoming a milestone in the history of modern accounting and earning him an invitation to the Sforza court.
3. 1496–1517Milan · MilanInvited to Milan c. 1496 by Ludovico Sforza to teach mathematics, he and Leonardo taught each other: Pacioli instructed him in Euclid and operations with radicals, while Leonardo drew skeleton diagrams of the regular polyhedra for De divina proportione. The book was written in Milan in 1496–1498 and published in Venice in 1509. Both men left Milan in 1499 because of the French occupation. Pacioli died on or about 19 June 1517.