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
is appended.
Originally published in 1953.
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