Jerome Cardan was an Italian Renaissance man known as a gambler, physician, and mathematician. Cardan was helpful in improving algebra, but he was also accomplished as a chess player and gambler. He wrote the book called “Liber de ludo aleae” or “Book on Games of Chance”. He was the first to devise a book and system of probability. He also wrote a section on how to cheat. Cardan was quite the inventor spending time creating combination locks, the Cardan shaft, and gimbal. The Cardan shaft is used in vehicles even today. Other research helped create the high speed printing press. Cardan created two encyclopaedias on natural science as well as contributions to hydrodynamics.
Cardan was an illegitimate child. He was born to Fazio Cardano who was well known as a lawyer and gifted in mathematics. History tells us his father was a friend of da Vinci. Cardan wrote a book about his early life stating that his mother wanted to abort him, but was unsuccessful. It was also a time during the plague where she lost her other three children and she moved on to Pavia where he was born to escape the death.
He studied medicine at University and tried to get into the College of Physicians in Milan, but his reputation and illegitimate birth denied him. This did not stop him though because he spent several years building a reputation as a physician eventually becoming very valuable to the courts. He was even the first to write a description about typhoid fever.
Cardan is mostly known for his work in algebra with the concept of imaginary numbers and other equations like the binomial coefficients and binomial theorem. Given Cardan’s status as an illegitimate child he was always short of funds. He had to work in order to get more money, which is why he also turned to gambling. As a gambler he was able to keep himself solvent. He would gamble as well as play chess games. It was during the 1520s that he wrote his book of strategies for gambling, but it took until 1663 and towards the end of his life before he was able to get it published.
The book was all about probability in how you can win by counting cards or mathematically examining the probabilities on the game one is playing. He certainly had some effective cheating methods written in the book, which are still popular today though we have plenty of ways to find cheaters in gambling unlike before.
Cardan’s family life was fraught with disaster. His eldest son poisoned his wife, his other son was a gambler who stole money, and Cardan was even accused of heresy when he published the horoscope of Jesus. Cardan did live to the age of 74 in Rome under the protection of the pope. As a man in early history his was certainly one that contributed a great deal to math and science, even though some of it was directly related to gambling.