Seven lucky ways that gambling changed maths

Gambling is the vice that helped make the modern world. Here mathematician Adam Kucharski explains how casinos and card games inspired many ideas that are now fundamental to science.

1. Dice games and the birth of a new science

In the 16^th Century, there was no way to quantify luck. If someone rolled two sixes during a game of dice, people thought it was just good fortune. Gerolamo Cardano, an Italian physician with a lifelong gambling habit, thought otherwise. He decided to tackle betting games mathematically, and wrote a gamblers manual that outlined how to navigate the 'sample space' of possible events. For example, while two dice can land in 36 different ways, only one of these produces two sixes.