1501-1576

Italian Mathematician

Amathematician and physician, Girolamo or Geronimo Cardano lived a turbulent personal and professional life, and became embroiled in a conflict over cubic equations so full of drama and surprises that it sounds more like a movie script than an incident from the history of mathematics. He was also one of the first mathematicians to conceive the idea that negative numbers have square roots, but lacked the conceptual framework for understanding these imaginary numbers.

Born in Pavia, Italy, on September 24, 1501, Cardano was the illegitimate son of Fazio Cardano and Chiara Micheri. The father was a successful lawyer and friend of Leonard da Vinci (1452-1519), but the fact that his parents did not marry until after his birth—and the father did not begin living with the family until Cardano was seven years old—provided a constant source of stigma for the young Cardano.

Cardano...