Girolamo Cardan (1501-1576) was born in Pavia and died in Rome. His father was Fazio Cardan, who entered into a liaison with a widow, much younger than him. The father wanted to keep this a secret out of fear of exposing himself to ridicule. Among other things this resulted in an attempt to terminate the pregnancy when the couple were expecting Girolamo. Which may have adversely affected him.
Cardan entered the legal profession and earned the degree of doctor of medicine at Padua in 1526. Cardan began in poverty, (probably because his illegitimate birth) and escaped from anxieties by indulging in his passion for gambling. His treatise, Liber de Ludo Aleae, introduced the idea of probability as we use it today, and also included ways to cheat in these games. His knowledge of gambling led him to discover one of the most fundamental laws of the theory of probability.
In 1531, he married Lucia Bandareni and after several miscarriages she bore him two sons and a daughter. One might say that his sons were "chip of the old block" since one robbed his father and the other married and later poisoned his wife.
He was a writer on a wide variety of subjects such as medicine, astronomy, astrology, philosophy and mathematics. At the age of 25, Cardan wrote The book of my life (De Vita Propria Liber). Cardan was interested in publishing all the new ideas he could obtain, not only his own but also those of other men as well. It was this attitude that led to the conflict with Tartaglia. However, Cardan did never claim credit for any idea that was not his own.
Cardanīs encyclopedic work, De Subtilitate, is generally regarded as his chief work since the book went through about ten reprinting during his lifetime. The first edition of The Great Art , in which he made public Tartaglias method of solving cubic equations, was published in 1545. A second edition appeared 25 years later. The Great Art was the direct cause of one of the most violent feuds of priority in the history of science.
In 1570, Cardan was arrested and jailed on a charge of heresy. The charge could be substantiated by a horoscope of Christ. As a punishment he was denied the the right to lecture publicly and was ordered to refrain from writing and publishing books.