The man who was the first to describe and lay out the rules for modern day bookkeeping is actually quite unknown despite of his work on mathematics and his friendship with the one of the most known man of his time Leonardo Da Vinci. Luca Pacioli was born around 1445 in Tuscany to a poor family. He worked as a apprentice for local merchants but moved in his twenties to Venice and started to teach three merchant´s sons. For them he wrote his first book handling arithmetics and opened his writers career. At the same time he continued his education, and later on moved to Perugia to become a teacher in mathematics in the university.
In 1494 Luca Pacioli wrote his famous book Summa de arithmetica, gemometria, proportioni et proportionalita in which he wrote as well about the double-entry bookkeeping (in Finnish=kirjanpito) used by Venetian merchants of his time for one chapter. The book made him famous throughout the whole Europe and it was widely read. Couple of years after publishing his work Pacioli moved to Milan, where he continued his career in mathematics. There he also met his future collaborator and roommate Leonardo Da Vinci.
In this time he also wrote several other works, such as De viridus quantitatis which was about mathematics and magic and De divina proportione which handled the mathematic and the artistic proportions. However he and Leonardo Da Vinci were forced to leave Milan in 1499 due to political circumstances and their ways were separated later on. Luca Pacioli spent most of his later years and died in his hometown in Tuscany around 1517.
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