Mathematical Personalities: Gerolamo Cardano

Sorry about the lack of updates, but the life has been busy.

Down to business.

The Italian Renaissance was one of those interesting times in world history in which the great increase in knowledge and trade led to an explosion of wealth, which led to more knowledge and trade, and so on...but we have to remember that these are not modern people. This was a time that was altogether more violent and chaotic than anything we see today (in the Western world, anyway) because for some reason the people of that time and place really knew how to work the chaos into something rather creative. I mentioned Cardano before, but in the context of the solution to the cubic equation, which is a great story. Now I want to mention some other things about the man. The events of his life illustrate the differences between that era and this.

Remember that the modern world comes largely from the Enlightenment with heavy doses of Modernism and Postmodernism thrown into the mix. This all happened after the Renaissance, and the 16th century was more like the medieval world than like ours. His mother fled the plague. He had trouble starting a career in medicine because his parents were not married. He was a gambler and wrote a book on the subject that was the first to make probability into a science. While he contributed to the sciences and mathematics, he was an astrologer as well and was arrested for heresy after casting the horoscope of Jesus.

People who are brilliant enough to make lasting contributions to mathematics have a tendency to be eccentric. Add to this the fact that many discoveries were made before what we would call the modern era, and we find that the people of the history of mathematics are incredible to study.