A work of science that reads like a novel, a story that demands to be heard about an extraordinary inventor who should never have been forgotten, and one of the best non-fiction reads of this or any other year. It resurrects from the vaults of neglect the polymath Jerome Cardano, a Milanese of the sixteenth century. Who is he? The son of a mathematician and a brothel keeper, but also unacknowledged discoverer of so much: probability theory, imaginary numbers, statistics, atomic physics, and even quantum theory.