Which Italian mathematician wrote 'Summa de Arithmetica'?

Luca Pacioli wrote Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita, a wide-ranging mathematical work first published in Venice in 1494. Pacioli was an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar whose book summarized practical arithmetic, algebra, geometry, commercial mathematics, and accounting for readers in the mercantile world.

The Summa is especially famous for containing the first printed description of double-entry bookkeeping. Pacioli did not invent the system; merchants in northern Italy were already using it. His achievement was to explain and spread the method, helping standardize practices involving debits, credits, ledgers, and balances. This later earned him the informal title “father of accounting.”

The book was written in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, making it accessible to merchants and students. Pacioli later worked with Leonardo da Vinci, but Leonardo did not write the Summa. Fibonacci had earlier helped popularize Hindu-Arabic numerals in Europe through Liber Abaci, while Galileo belonged to a later generation and was known primarily for astronomy and physics.