Mathematics was only one area of interest for Gerolamo Cardano the sixteenth-century astrologer, philosopher, and physician was also a prolific author and inveterate gambler. Gambling led Cardano to the study of probability, and he was the first writer to recognize that random events are governed by mathematical laws.
Published posthumously in 1663, Cardano's "Liber de ludo aleae" (Book on Games of Chance) is often considered the major starting point of the study of mathematical probability. The Italian scholar formulated some of the field's basic ideas more than a century before the...