The Book of My Life by Girolamo Cardano, New York Review of Books Classics series/Granta, $14.95/£9.99, ISBN 1590170164 Reviewed by John Bonner
MATHEMATICIAN, physician, engineer and charlatan – Girolamo Cardano was one of the great polymaths of the Italian renaissance. Arguably more famous at the time than his near contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, this illegitimate son of a Milanese lawyer could also claim to have left a more enduring scientific legacy. While Leonardo’s plans for prototype helicopters and parachutes never got off the drawing board, at least one of Cardano’s ideas keeps running as the basis of the cardan…
