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Updated: April 30, 2025
He was born at Pavia from the illicit union of Fazio Cardano, a Milanese jurisconsult and mathematician of considerable repute, and a young widow, whose maiden name had been Chiara Micheria, his father being fifty-six, and his mother thirty-seven years of age at his birth.
The sons of Fazio Cardano, his great-grandfather, Joanni, Aldo, and Antonio, lived to be severally ninety-four, eighty-eight, and eighty-six years of age. Of these Joanni begat two sons: Antonio, who lived eighty-eight years, and Angelo, who reached the age of eighty-six.
Gian Battista Cardano was now in his fourteenth year, and, according to the usages of the time, old enough to make a beginning of his training in Medicine, the profession he was destined to follow.
Gian Battista eventually gained the baccalaureat in his twenty-second year, and two years after became a member of the College. The life which Cardan planned to lead at Pavia was unquestionably a full one. He had several young men under his care as pupils besides his son, amongst them being a kinsman of his, Gasparo Cardano, a youth of sterling virtue and a useful coadjutor in times to come.
Now this fellow, who never once entered the class-room, nor had a word with any one of my pupils, wrote, on what authority I know not, a report in these words: 'Concerning Girolamo Cardano, I am told that he taught in this place, but got no pupils, always lecturing to empty benches: that he is a man of evil life, ill regarded by all, and little less than a fool, repulsive in his manners, and entirely unskilled in medicine.
The death of a young kinsman, Niccolo Cardano, suggested to him a theme which he elaborated in a tract called De immortalitate paranda, a work which perished unlamented by its author, and a little later he wrote a treatise on the calculation of the distances between the various heavenly bodies.
"When I had completed my sixteenth year up to which time I served my father constantly we once more changed our house, and dwelt with Alessandro Cardano next door to the bakery of the Bossi.
That his offence did not meet with universal reprobation is shown by negative testimony in the Judicium de Cardano, by Gabriel Naudé. In the course of his essay Naudé lets it be seen how thoroughly he dislikes the character of the man about whom he writes.
The Archbishop declared that his illness was alleviated but not cured, and only gave way unwillingly when Cardan brought forward arguments to show what dangers and inconveniences he would incur through a longer stay. Cardan had originally settled to return by way of Paris, but letters which he received from his young kinsman, Gasparo Cardano, and from Ranconet, led him to change his plans.
Tartaglia in his answer is not to be moved from his belief, and tells Cardan flatly that he is still convinced Giovanni Colla took the questions to Milan, where he found no one able to solve them, not even Messer Hieronimo Cardano, and that the mathematician last-named sent them on by the bookseller for solution, as has been already related.
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