the father of probability—the first person who we know of to go beyond a vision of chance as some sort of unknowable goddess, or otherwise in the purview of the supernatural—was a gambler. Girolamo Cardano was a doctor, a mathematician, a philosopher. He was part of the group responsible for the advent of higher algebra and was known for his thought-provoking prose (Shakespeare, it seems, was a fan, and it has been claimed that Cardano’s Consolation was the book originally held by Hamlet in the “To be or not to be?”
