It was the end of a particularly taxing day, and Canal, a prominent 14th-century Venetian merchant, was baffled. A friend had posed him a simple-sounding mathematical problem, but he still couldn’t figure it out. The problem went like this: the distance between Venice and Ancona is 200 miles, and there are two ships, one in each port, leaving on the same day. The trip to Venice takes 30 days, while to Ancona, 40 days. When will the ships come together?

Canal scratched his head. “Perhaps it will be easier to solve if I write it down,” he thought and jotted down the problem in a notebook he kept with him at all times. Thus, among his thoughts and notes on the day’s events, a mathematical problem was added, and the zibaldone was born; the precursor to the modern blog, with random thoughts and images that detailed a person’s life.

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