Girolamo Cardano

Cardano studied to be a physician but his application to join the Academy of Physicians of Padua was denied, partly due to his illegitimate birth and partly due to an inflexible and often tactless character. Unable to practice medicine and having squandered his small inheritance from his father, he turned to gambling, something that was to be a lifelong obsession.

Cardano's obsession with gambling led him to investigate probability -- so successfully that he won more often than he lost. His treatise on games of chance, written in 1525, is today recognized as one of the first formalulations of counting and probability principles. However, his efforts were almost totally ignored by his contemporaries and, indeed, his book on counting was not even published until 1663.

Eventually Cardano was appointed as a lecturer at the Piatti Foundation in Milan. Here he finally impressed his contemporaries by solving cubic polynomial equations. He was unable to generalize to quartic equations, however the problem was solved by his student Ferrari.

Eventually Cardano, despite publishing a polemic attacking the morals and legitimacy of the College of Physicians, was admitted to the practice of medicine. Gambling continued as an obsession throughout his life and his inflexible personality often got him in trouble -- including being jailed for heresy for casting a horoscope for Jesus Christ.

However, by the end of his life Cardano was widely recognized as the finest physician of his day, had written best-selling books, had made fundamental contributions to algebra, mechanics, geology and medicine. While the mathematical community honored him for his work in solving cubic equations, his even more seminal work on probability went unrecognized for centuries.

Born: 24 Sept 1501 in Pavia, Duchy of Milan (now Italy)
Died: 21 Sept 1576 in Rome (now Italy)