“Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni Et Proportionalita” to be sold

MODERN CAPITALISM began among the European merchant families of the early Renaissance—the Fuggers of Augsburg, Medicis of Florence and, in Venice, one Antonio de Rompiasi, who in 1464 hired a tutor in mathematics for his three sons. With examples from dealers in butter to lemons to silk, Pacioli set out the method for tracking income and expenditure and the calculation of net profit or loss, which for the first time allowed an immediate snapshot of a firm’s financial position. Like many monumental works of 15th-century printing, Pacioli’s treatise has survived in its original form.

Source: www.economist.com