ABSTRACT
Mathematics can be applied to unravel the mysteries of nature, the very laws of the universe, but Gerolamo Cardano applied it in another direction. His Liber de Ludo Aleae, can be considered the first book on probability, but it’s also a gambling manual for this was his motivation in developing the subject. Cardano calculated the odds of the various sums that can be obtained from rolling dice two and three at a time, as well as the odds connected with card games. He also defined the chance of an event, what mathematicians now call the probability, as the ratio of the number of ways it can happen to the total number of possible outcomes, both favorable and unfavorable. While Cardano’s work was an important beginning, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat are generally credited for laying the foundation of the theory of probability.
