Gerolamo Cardano

Gerolamo or Giro-lamo or Geronimo Cardano  was an Italian polymath, whose interests and proficiencies ranged from being a mathematician, physician, biologist, physicist, chemist, astro-loger, astronomer, philosopher, writer, and gambler.

He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the Renaissance, and was one of the key figures in the foundation of probability and the earliest introducer of the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem in the western world. He wrote more than 200 works on science.

He was born on  24 September 1501 in Pavia, Lombardy, the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano, a mathematically gifted jurist, lawyer, and close personal friend of Leonardo da Vinci . Cardano made several contributions to hydrodynamics and held that perpetual motion is impossible, except in celestial bodies.