Cardano: The Gambling Scholar (Princeton Legacy Library, 5063)

Cardano, next to Vesalius the greatest physician of his day, was also a devoted and skilled gambler who played for personal pleasure and profit. His mathematical genius enabled him to devise simple rules of probability for his own benefit and for his gambling contemporaries. These he collected in his Book on Games of Chance and embellished them with essays on the tricks of cheats and kibitzers, as well as on psychological rules of play.

In this biography of a stormy Renaissance personality, Cardano's gambling studies are deciphered for the first time, and a translation of the Book on Games of Chance is appended.

Originally published in 1953.

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