Girolamo Cardano — Jerome Cardan to the English — was the most scandalous genius of the Italian Renaissance: physician, astrologer, compulsive gambler, and the mathematician whose Ars Magna first published the solution of the cubic. W. G. Waters’s Jerome Cardan: A Biographical Study follows the whole turbulent arc, from illegitimate birth through European fame to the imprisonment and broken old age he recorded with terrible honesty in his autobiography.
The feud with Tartaglia over the cubic equation is here, along with the gambling mathematics that made Cardano an accidental founder of probability. Download the free EPUB for the life of a man whose equations were tidier than his existence.