Free Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos by Peter M. Hoffmann Page B

Las Vegas casinos and clean them out. Certainly an interesting way to pay for college and a great idea for a movie (based on a true story), but it is hardly original: the idea to pay for college by gambling precedes 21 by five hundred years.
    The person who first conceived of this ingenious use of gambling was born in 1501, an unwanted son to an unmarried couple in Milan, Italy. His mother, Chiara, already had several children and didn’t want another one. When an herbal concoction failed to produce the desired abortion, she was gratified to give birth to a baby so ill that he was not expected to survive. Much to his mother’s chagrin, the baby pulled through after taking a bath in red wine. So began the low-probability life of the first person to develop a theory of probability.
    As our hero grew up, his lawyer father, Fazio, used him as a book carrier and mobile reading desk, weighing down the five-year-old with piles of heavy books and kicking him through the streets. Only when the boy became seriously ill at age eight did his father repent and have him baptized,giving him the name Gerolamo Cardano. Cardano was a curious Renaissance genius: physician, mathematician, gambler, mechanical engineer, and founder of probability theory. As Gerolamo grew up, he accompanied his father on visits to many of the lawyer’s clients, whom Fazio consulted in geometry and law. When Gerolamo was thirteen, his father took him to meet the great Leonardo da Vinci. The boy had a voracious appetite for knowledge, learning Latin and geometry, and there was nothing that did not interest him, from witchcraft and horoscopes to the construction of spider webs and the circulation of the blood. He was well on his way to becoming a scholar and making a name for himself. Unfortunately, despite his great promise, his father refused to send him away for further education.
    One day, when Fazio struck his wife in a fit of rage, she hit her head on a table. Fazio regretted his violent act immediately, but Chiara, having grown fond of her unwanted son, Gerolamo, milked the incident for all it was worth. Fainting repeatedly and crying out to her sister who had witnessed the event, she made Fazio promise to let her son attend college. Reluctantly agreeing to this blackmail, Fazio suggested law as it was a lucrative field of study. There was a stipend to be had, and Gerolamo’s father, like many fathers, was eager to get his son an education without having to pay the tuition. Gerolamo, however, did not care about law. He wanted to be a medical doctor, but his father refused to pay for such an expensive course of study. Gerolamo had to find the money somewhere else.
    He found it in gambling. Gerolamo preferred playing dice, because he had a natural sense for its probabilities. He did not cheat (a practice not recommended in a time when cheaters often found themselves hanging from the rafters), but he knew how to place bets. Before long, he had saved enough money to pursue medical studies at the renowned University of Padua. After some difficult years, including his annoying his fellow physicians by writing a dissertation about their poor practices, Cardano became a successful physician and chairman of the medical faculty in Padua. He wrote numerous books about medicine and mathematics, especially algebra. And he never forgot his gambling days. Wanting to share his experiences, he wrote the first theory of gambling, Liber De Ludo Aleae (“The book on games of chance”).
    Although Cardano’s book was not published until a hundred years after it was written, it was a landmark work, introducing the fundamental idea of calculating probabilities: If you wanted to know the probability of a certain event out of all possible events, count the number of ways the event could occur, and divide it by the number of all possible events. This method of calculating assumed that all events were equally likely. Here is an example: What is the probability that you will roll a