Nicolaus lived a long life, from 1623 to 1708, and had three sons, Jacob, Nicolaus (known as Nicolaus I), and Johann. We shall meet Jacob again shortly, as the discoverer of the Law of Large Numbers in his book Ars Conjectandi {The Art of Conjecture). Jacob was both a great teacher who attracted students from all over Europe and an acclaimed genius in mathematics, engineering, and astronomy. The Victorian statistician Francis Galton describes him as having “a bilious and melancholic temperament. . . sure but slow.”4 His relationship with his father was so poor that he took as his motto Invito
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