Gerolamo Cardano

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pages: 266 words: 86,324

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

You don’t need calculus, geometry, algebra, or even amphetamines, which Erdös was reportedly fond of taking.8 (As legend has it, once after quitting for a month, he remarked, “Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.”) All you need is a basic understanding of how probability works and the law of the sample space, that framework for analyzing chance situations that was first put on paper in the sixteenth century by Gerolamo Cardano. GEROLAMO CARDANO was no rebel breaking forth from the intellectual milieu of sixteenth-century Europe. To Cardano a dog’s howl portended the death of a loved one, and a few ravens croaking on the roof meant a grave illness was on its way. He believed as much as anyone else in fate, in luck, and in seeing your future in the alignment of planets and stars.

The old man died on September 20, a few days shy of his seventy-fifth birthday. He had outlived two of his three children; at his death his surviving son was employed by the Inquisition as a professional torturer. That plum job was a reward for having given evidence against his father. Before his death, Gerolamo Cardano burned 170 unpublished manuscripts.1 Those sifting through his possessions found 111 that survived. One, written decades earlier and, from the looks of it, often revised, was a treatise of thirty-two short chapters. Titled The Book on Games of Chance, it was the first book ever written on the theory of randomness.

Cardano’s work also transcended the primitive state of mathematics in his day, for algebra and even arithmetic were yet in their stone age in the early sixteenth century, preceding even the invention of the equal sign. History has much to say about Cardano, based on both his autobiography and the writings of some of his contemporaries. Some of the writings are contradictory, but one thing is certain: born in 1501, Gerolamo Cardano was not a child you’d have put your money on. His mother, Chiara, despised children, though—or perhaps because—she already had three boys. Short, stout, hot tempered, and promiscuous, she prepared a kind of sixteenth-century morning-after pill when she became pregnant with Gerolamo—a brew of wormwood, burned barleycorn, and tamarisk root.


pages: 416 words: 112,268

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, ImageNet competition, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, luminiferous ether, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, OpenAI, openstreetmap, P = NP, paperclip maximiser, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, positional goods, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Thales of Miletus, The Future of Employment, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Bayes, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transport as a service, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, zero-sum game

The difference between this harebrained house-buying plan and my sober and sensible airport plan is, however, just a matter of degree. Both are gambles, but one seems more rational than the other. It turns out that gambling played a central role in generalizing Aristotle’s proposal to account for uncertainty. In the 1560s, the Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano developed the first mathematically precise theory of probability—using dice games as his main example. (Unfortunately, his work was not published until 1663.13) In the seventeenth century, French thinkers including Antoine Arnauld and Blaise Pascal began—for assuredly mathematical reasons—to study the question of rational decisions in gambling.14 Consider the following two bets: A: 20 percent chance of winning $10 B: 5 percent chance of winning $100 The proposal the mathematicians came up with is probably the same one you would come up with: compare the expected values of the bets, which means the average amount you would expect to get from each bet.

The quotation is taken from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, 3, 1112b. 13. Cardano, one of the first European mathematicians to consider negative numbers, developed an early mathematical treatment of probability in games. He died in 1576, eighty-seven years before his work appeared in print: Gerolamo Cardano, Liber de ludo aleae (Lyons, 1663). 14. Arnauld’s work, initially published anonymously, is often called The Port-Royal Logic: Antoine Arnauld, La logique, ou l’art de penser (Chez Charles Savreux, 1662). See also Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Chez Guillaume Desprez, 1670). 15. The concept of utility: Daniel Bernoulli, “Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis,” Proceedings of the St.


pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

How do you get your $1 million check from the Clay Mathematics Institute? Slow down. You almost surely don’t have a proof. Realize why your proof doesn’t work, and you will have obtained enlightenment. Let me mention a few of the common mistakes people make when thinking they have a proof. Perhaps the first bad P ≠ NP proof goes back to 1550 and the writings of Gerolamo Cardano, an Italian mathematician considered one of the founders of the field of probability. Cardano, in creating a new cryptographic system, argued for the security of his system because there were too many keys to check them all. But his system was easily broken. You don’t have to check all the keys when doing cryptanalysis on secret messages.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Alberti was far from the only Renaissance scholar fascinated by cryptography—the growing sophistication of European mathematics; the search for hidden patterns in nature, which might illuminate religious mysteries or reveal secret knowledge; the unprecedented spread of information enabled by the printing press; and the tangled diplomatic environment of Renaissance Europe all provided fertile ground for the development of ever more complex methods of cryptography and cryptanalysis. In the sixteenth century, Johannes Trithemius and Giovan Battista Bellasso created their own polyalphabetic ciphers, while Gerolamo Cardano and Blaise de Vigenère pioneered autokey ciphers, in which the message itself is incorporated into the key.29 All of these cryptographic innovations were matched by innovations in cryptanalysis—a Renaissance version of the same escalation that drives advances in both cybersecurity and cyber attacks today.


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

He knows a great deal about probability theory,35 so I asked him if our contemporary understanding of probability is still evolving and if the way people understood probability three hundred years ago has any relationship to how we will gauge probability three hundred years from today. His response: “What we think about probability in 2016 is what we thought in 1716, for sure . . . probably in 1616, for the most part . . . and probably what [Renaissance mathematician and degenerate gambler Gerolamo] Cardano thought in 1564. I know this sounds arrogant, but what we’ve believed about probability since 1785 is still what we’ll believe about probability in 2516.” If we base any line of reasoning around consistent numeric values, there is no way to be wrong, unless we are (somehow) wrong about the very nature of the numbers themselves.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The calculations have a flaw only when they meet reality. On paper, the martingale seems to work fine; in practical terms, it’s hopeless. When it comes to gambling, understanding the theory behind a game can make all the difference. But what if that theory hasn’t been invented yet? During the Renaissance, Gerolamo Cardano was an avid gambler. Having frittered away his inheritance, he decided to make his fortune by betting. For Cardano, this meant measuring how likely random events were. Probability as we know it did not exist in Cardano’s era. There were no laws about chance events, no rules about how likely something was.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

But there is no mention of Hume or miracles in Bayes’s one influential work, the one describing his theorem: An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances. Nor do we know for certain when the Essay was written. Richard Price discovered it after Bayes’s death, filed among papers of the late 1740s. Bayes’s Theorem The theory of probability began at the gambling table. Gerolamo Cardano was the ultimate Renaissance man—a philosopher, mathematician, physicist, astronomer, astrologer, inventor, chemist, biologist, and fashionable physician. He was also a compulsive gambler who by his admission bet daily for twenty-five years. Cardano’s short treatise on probability was an attempt to understand how so much money had slipped through his fingers.


pages: 315 words: 93,628

Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

In fact, the feeling that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics was so deeply rooted that many mathematicians absolutely refused even to consider mathematical concepts and structures that were not directly related to the physical world. This was the case, for instance, with the colorful Gerolamo Cardano (1501–76). Cardano was an accomplished mathematician, renowned physician, and compulsive gambler. In 1545 he published one of the most influential books in the history of algebra—the Ars Magna (The Great Art). In this comprehensive treatise Cardano explored in great detail solutions to algebraic equations, from the simple quadratic equation (in which the unknown appears to the second power: x2) to pioneering solutions to the cubic (involving x3), and quartic (involving x4) equations.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Although people still played the astragalus in the streets of Milan, Pavia and Bologna, Italy’s big university towns, new games of chance and business opportunities were tempting Renaissance men to try their luck at taming the goddess Fortuna. One such man was mathematician, scientist, philosopher and physician Gerolamo Cardano,6 who was born in Pavia in 1501. Gerolamo was one of the greatest intellectuals of Renaissance Italy, but from the outset the Fates dealt him a difficult hand, and despite his many talents and achievements his life was beset by unfortunate circumstances beyond his control. He was the bastard son to a mathematician friend of Leonardo da Vinci, Fazio Cardano, who held a chair of mathematics at Pavia University, one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in the world.


pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

But Samuelson did find something else by Bachelier that piqued his interest: Bachelier’s dissertation, published under the title A Theory of Speculation. He checked it out of the library and brought it back to his office. Bachelier was not, of course, the first person to take a mathematical interest in games of chance. That distinction goes to the Italian Renaissance man Gerolamo Cardano. Born in Milan around the turn of the sixteenth century, Cardano was the most accomplished physician of his day, with popes and kings clamoring for his medical advice. He authored hundreds of essays on topics ranging from medicine to mathematics to mysticism. But his real passion was gambling.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Most original ideas turn out either to be not original after all, or original for the very good reason that they are useless. And when an original idea does work, the returns can be too high to be sensibly measured. The Spitfire is one of countless examples of these unlikely ideas, which range from the sublime (the mathematician and gambler Gerolamo Cardano first explored the idea of ‘imaginary numbers’ in 1545; these apparently useless curiosities later turned out to be essential for developing radio, television and computing) to the ridiculous (in 1928, Alexander Fleming didn’t keep his laboratory clean, and ended up discovering the world’s first antibiotic in a contaminated Petri dish).


pages: 409 words: 107,511

Antwerp: The Glory Years by Michael Pye

European colonialism, Gerolamo Cardano, moral hazard, Republic of Letters, spice trade, the market place, trade route, traveling salesman

This matters because it finally appeared only in 1573, twelve years after Bandello’s death, from Alessandro Marsili, a Lyons printer who at least could not be accused of heresy since he was trying to get himself a cash reward for having a Protestant beheaded during religious riots.7 Marsili included a preface supposedly by Bandello to his ‘honest’ readers, which makes the dead man sound defensive. He writes that there was no point in any censoring, because the story was far too well known all over Europe, and in any case he would not be the first to put it in print; the ‘most learnèd Cardano, in his admirable De subtilitate rerum, mentions such a notorious case’.8 Gerolamo Cardano was in Padua, and his encyclopedic De subtilitate first appeared in 1552, which would show the story moving briskly on the trade runs out of Antwerp and towards Northern Italy. But Bandello, or his publisher, didn’t get the right book. Cardano was fascinated by technology and he put the trap chair into his De rerum varietate of 1557, under ‘concealed weapons’ and filed between ‘glass’ and ‘sailing aids’ with some sensational details which are remarkably exact.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

This little guess, sliding a couple of times from two-ness to three-ness, and also once from three-ness to four-ness (which in itself comes from a mini-analogy: “4 is to 3 as 3 is to 2”) seems like an utter triviality, but without very simple-seeming conceptual slippages of this sort, which crop up absolutely everywhere in mathematics, it would be impossible to make any kind of progress at all. Let’s return to the story of the solution of “the” cubic equation (the reason for the quote marks will emerge shortly). It all took place in Italy — first in Bologna (Scipione del Ferro), and a bit later in Brescia (Niccolò Tartaglia) and Milan (Gerolamo Cardano). Del Ferro found a partial solution first but didn’t publish it; some twenty years later, Tartaglia found essentially the same partial solution; finally, Cardano generalized their findings and published them in a famous book called Ars Magna (“The Great Art”). The odd thing is that, as things were coming into focus, in order to list all the “different” solutions of the cubic equation, Cardano had to use thirteen chapters!

But the predilection of the human mind to make analogies left and right was far too strong for that to be the case. The discovery of the solution of the cubic by the Italians in the sixteenth century inspired European mathematicians to seek analogous solutions to equations having higher degrees than 3. In fact, Gerolamo Cardano himself, aided by Lodovico Ferrari, solved the quartic — the fourth-degree equation. Even though there was no geometric interpretation for an expression like “x4 ”, the purely formal analogy between the equation ax3 +bx2 + cx + d = 0 and its longer cousin ax4 + bx3 + cx2 + dx + e = 0 was so alluring to Cardano that he could not resist tackling the challenge.