Sunday 21 September 2014

This 16th century polymath was first to describe typhoid, formulated probability's elementary rules & invented other things too!



Gerolamo (or Girolamo, or Geronimo) Cardano (24 September 1501 – 21 September 1576) was an Italian Renaissance mathematician, physician, astrologer, philosopher and gambler. He wrote more than 200 works on medicine, mathematics, physics, philosophy, religion, and music. His gambling led him to formulate elementary rules in probability, making him one of the founders of the field. He was the first to describe typhoid fever. In 1553 he cured the Scottish Archbishop of St Andrews of a disease that had left him speechless and was thought incurable. Today, he is best known for his achievements in algebra. Cardano was the first mathematician to make systematic use of numbers less than zero. He published the solutions to the cubic and quartic equations in his 1545 book Ars Magna. Read more...