When was girolamo cardano born

He was born in Pavia, Lombardy, the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano, a mathematically gifted lawyer, who was a friend of Leonardo da Vinci. In his autobiography, Cardano claimed that his mother had attempted to abort him. Shortly before his birth, his mother had to move from Milan to Pavia to escape the Plague; her three other children died from the disease. In , he entered the University of Pavia and later in Padua studied medicine.

His eccentric and confrontational style did not earn him many friends and he had a difficult time finding work after his studies had ended. In , Cardano repeatedly applied to the College of Physicians in Milan, but was not admitted owing to his combative reputation and illegitimate birth. Eventually, he managed to develop a considerable reputation as a physician and his services were highly valued at the courts.

He was the first to describe typhoid fever. In he cured the Scottish Archbishop of St Andrews of a disease that had left him speechless and was thought incurable. The diplomat Thomas Randolph recorded the "merry tales" rumoured about his methods still current in Edinburgh nine years later. Cardano himself wrote that the Archbishop had been short of breath for ten years, and after the cure was effected by his assistant, he was paid 1, gold crowns. 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 book Ars Magna. The quartic was solved by Cardano's student Lodovico Ferrari. Both were acknowledged in the foreword of the book, as well as in several places within its body. In his exposition, he acknowledged the existence of what are now called imaginary numbers, although he did not understand their properties described for the first time by his Italian contemporary Rafael Bombelli, although the necessary mathematical theory of fields was not to be developed for hundreds of years.

In Opus novum de proportionibus he introduced the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem. Cardano was notoriously short of money and kept himself solvent by being an accomplished gambler and chess player. His book about games of chance, Liber de ludo aleae "Book on Games of Chance" , written around ,but not published until , contains the first systematic treatment of probability,as well as a section on effective cheating methods.

In he gained some notoriety by attacking the then-existing practices of medicine, but this aided rather than hindered him, for 3 years later he was admitted to the College of Physicians and later was appointed rector of the college. In he was professor of medicine at the University of Pavia. In Cardano published two books on arithmetic, which were based on the lectures he had been giving at Milan, and they proved to be among the best mathematical texts of the time.

Of more importance, however, was the Ars magna Artis magnaesive de regulis algebraicis of , which was devoted solely to algebra and was the first important printed work on the subject. It was published in Nuremberg and contained the theories of algebraic equations as they were known at that time. Cardano wrote other mathematical works and a book on games of chance which discussed probability theory.

Cardano's most popular work was De subtilitate rerum , an encyclopedia of physical inventions and experiments. It was followed by a companion piece De varietate rerum published in In both books Cardano shows himself to have been a man of many interests and possessed of a great curiosity. In his writings on magnetism he advanced the idea that magnets can grow old and lose their potency, and that a magnetized needle turns on its pivot spontaneously.

He associated magnetism with the pull exerted by a star in the tail of the constellation Ursa Major the Big Dipper. He distinguished between electrical and magnetic attraction, defining the former as the flow and return of a fatty substance to which dry things adhere. In particular, Cardano formulated the fundamentally important concept of solving a probability problem by identifying a sample space with equally likely outcomes.

Cardano suffered a number of other tragedies as well. Cardano's son Giambatista poisoned his wife. Cardano was jailed briefly for heresy in part for casting the horoscope of Jesus. Cardano supposedly predicted the date of his own death, a prediction that he perhaps ensured by suicide. In any event, Cardano died on September 21, in Rome.