In 1662, a servant found something sewn into the lining of a dead man’s coat. He had carried it against his chest for eight years and never told a soul it was there.
The man had built one of the first calculating machines in history and helped invent the mathematics of probability, the same math every casino and insurance company still runs on today. He could weigh the air and put a number on the future. Then one night he ran into something he could not measure, and he spent the rest of his life betting on it.
This is the story of the genius who could prove almost anything, and what he reached for when proof finally ran out.
