Gerolamo Cardano
Gerolamo Cardano or Girolamo Cardano, in English Jerome Cardan, or in Latin Hieronymus Cardanus was a celebrated
Italian Renaissance mathematician,
physician, astrologer, and
gambler.
He was born in
Pavia,
Italy, the illegitimate child of 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.
Encyclopedia
Gerolamo Cardano or
Girolamo Cardano, in English
Jerome Cardan, or in Latin
Hieronymus Cardanus was a celebrated
Italian Renaissance mathematician,
physician, astrologer, and
gambler.
He was born in
Pavia,
Italy, the illegitimate child of 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 1520, he entered the
University of Pavia and later in
Padua studying 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 1525, Cardano repeatedly applied to the College of Physicians in Milan, but was not allowed due to his reputation and illegitimate birth.
Eventually, he managed to develop a considerable reputation as physician and his services were highly valued at the courts. He was the first to describe typhoid fever.
Today, he is best known for his achievements in
algebra. He published the solutions to the
cubic and quartic equations in his 1545 book
Ars magna. The solution to one particular case of the cubic, x^3 + ax = b , was communicated to him by
Niccolo Fontana Tartaglia , and 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.
Cardano was notoriously short of money and kept himself afloat by being an accomplished gambler and
chess player. His book about games of chance,
Liber de ludo aleae, written in the 1560s but published only in 1663 after his death, contains the first systematic treatment of probability, as well as a section on effective cheating methods.
Cardano invented several mechanical devices including the
combination lock, the
gimbal consisting of three concentric rings allowing a supported
compass or
gyroscope to rotate freely, and the
Cardan shaft with
universal joints, which allows the transmission of rotary motion at various angles and is used in vehicles to this day. He made several contributions to hydrodynamics and held that
perpetual motion is impossible, except in celestial bodies. He published two
encyclopedias of natural science which contain a wide variety of inventions, facts, and occult superstitions. He also introduced the
Cardan grille, a cryptographic tool, in 1550.
Significantly, in the history of deaf education, he was one of the first to state that deaf people could learn without learning how to speak first.
Cardano's eldest and favorite son was executed in 1560 after he confessed to having
poisoned his
cuckolding wife. His other son was a gambler who stole money from him. Cardano himself was accused of heresy in 1570 because he had computed and published the
horoscope of
Jesus in 1554. Apparently, his own son contributed to the prosecution. He was arrested and had to spend several months in prison, was forced to abjure and give up his
professorship. He moved to
Rome, received a lifetime annuity from
Pope Gregory XIII and finished his autobiography. He died there on the day he had
astrologically predicted earlier .
Publications
- De malo recentiorum medicorum usu libellus, Venice, 1536 .
- Practica arithmetice et mensurandi singularis, Milan, 1539 .
- Artis magnae, sive de regulis algebraicis , Nuremberg, 1545 .
- De immortalitate .
- Opus novum de proportionibus .
- Contradicentium medicorum .
- De subtilitate rerum, Nuremberg, Johann Petreius, 1550 .
- De libris propriis, Leiden, 1557 .
- De varietate rerum, Basle, Heinrich Petri, 1559 .
- Opus novum de proportionibus numerorum, motuum, ponderum, sonorum, aliarumque rerum mensurandarum. Item de aliza regula, Basel, 1570.
- De vita propria, 1576 .
- Liber de ludo aleae, posthumous .
Further reading
- Cardano, Girolamo, Astrological Aphorisms of Cardan, The. Edmonds, WA: Sure Fire Press, 1989.
- ———— The Book of My Life. trans. by Jean Stoner. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002.
- Grafton, Anthony, Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
- Ore, Øystein: Cardano, the Gambling Scholar. Princeton, 1953.
- Cardano, Girolamo, Opera omnia, Charles Sponi, ed., 10 vols. Leiden, 1663.
- Dunham, William, Journey through Genius, Chapter 6, Penguin, 1991. Discusses Cardano's life and solution of the cubic equation.
External links
