18. Despite her name, my wife did not star in The Devil Wears Prada.

Shakespeare?

Yes, sir. As you like it.

Shakespeare's fellow playwright Ben Jonson thought Shakespeare had "Little Latin and less Greek." Playwright Christopher Marlowe managed to get himself killed in a bar while spying for Queen Elizabeth. Wifey Anne Hathaway got Shakespeare's second best bed. When his acting company found out the authorities were going to close his theater the company dismantled it timber by timber and transported it across the Thames river and re-built it. The competing theaters in London had child actors who were very popular and bearbaiting exhibitions. He complained about them in some of his plays.

Wow! I would never have guessed this one, Landmark.

1. I was born out of wedlock in the 16th century in Italy.

2. My father was a lawyer and personal friend of Leonardo da Vinci’s.

3. My mother took “various abortive medicines” to get rid of me, but to no avail and I was born while an outbreak of the Plague was raging; my three siblings died of it.

4. I graduated with a doctorate in medicine from the University of Padua.

5. I applied to the College of Physicians in Milan, but was not admitted because of my combative reputation and illegitimate birth.

6. I got married and had three children. Those were the best years of my life.

7. I was also a gifted mathematician and was the first to make systematic use of negative numbers.

8. I was always short of money and kept himself solvent by being an accomplished gambler and chess player.

9. To increase my advantage at gambling, I developed the first treatment of probability by throwing dice and defining the concept of odds.

10. My book ludo aleae (“Book on Games of Chance”), that describes my work on probability as well as effective cheating methods, was published in 1663, nearly one century after my death.

Oh, I forget his name. Something like Cardano?

Cardano, it is. Gerolamo (or Girolamo, or Geronimo) Cardano.

Brilliant mind. He hardly ever had a break. Two of his sons came to ignoble ends: one was beheaded for poisoning his wife and the other one, a gambler, Cardano disinherited for stealing money from him.

If I remember correctly he has a magic connection, too. I think he described a bunch of mathematical card tricks somewhere along the line.

But I think he qualifies as obscure. Had I not been a math teacher for a long time, I doubt I would have known his name. I remember coming across him when I wondered about solving cubic equations. There was some kind of wild competition between Cardano and another guy.

I'll pass to whomever wants to take it.

Yup, definitely obscure.

1. I was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana.

2. I attended Cornell University, but dropped out in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army.

3. As part of my training, I studied mechanical engineering at Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Obscure? Well, in the USA OK, but not so much in Europe where one of its mechanical inventions still bear his name: the cardan joint which is at the origin of the Universal Joint.

He's also famous for his astrological work.

OK, let's move on.

4. After my studies, I was deployed to Europe to fight in World War II.

5. Unfortunately, I was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge.

6. I was interned in Dresden. Thankfully, I survived the Allied bombing of that city.

7. After the war, I got married and fathered three children.

8. I later adopted my sister's three sons, after she died of cancer and her husband was killed in a train accident.

9. I published my first novel in 1952, but it was not commercially successful.

10. In the nearly 20 years that followed, I published several works that were well regarded.

11. I also published a short story collection, but real commercial and critical success only came with my sixth novel.