Editing Nicolo Tartaglia (section)

==Personal life==
Nicolo was born in [[Brescia]], the son of Michele, a dispatch rider who travelled to neighbouring towns to deliver mail. In 1506, Michele was murdered by robbers, and Nicolo, his two siblings, and his mother were left impoverished. Nicolo experienced further tragedy in 1512 when King Louis XII's troops invaded Brescia during the [[War of the League of Cambrai]] against [[Venice]]. The militia of Brescia defended their city for seven days. When the French finally broke through, they took their revenge by massacring the inhabitants of Brescia. By the end of battle, over 45,000 residents were killed. During the massacre, Nicolo and his family sought sanctuary in the local cathedral. But the French entered and a soldier sliced Nicolo's jaw and palate with a saber and left him for dead. His mother nursed him back to health but the young boy was left with a speech impediment, prompting the nickname "Tartaglia" ("stammerer"). After this he would never shave, and grew a beard to camouflage his scars.<ref>{{harvnb|Strathern|2013|loc=p. 189}}</ref>

His surname at birth, if any, is disputed.  Some sources have him as "'''Niccolò Fontana'''", but others claim that the only support for this is a will in which he named a brother, Zuampiero Fontana, as heir, and point out that this does not imply he had the same surname. <!--This is a temporary solution.  The support should be in a reference from the German Wikipedia, Friedrich Katscher: ''Die kubischen Gleichungen bei Nicolo Tartaglia: die relevanten Textstellen aus seinen „Quesiti et inventioni diverse“ auf deutsch übersetzt und kommentiert''. Wien 2001. However, I do not have this book. If anyone has access to it it would be much appreciated. -->

Tartaglia's biographer Arnoldo Masotti writes that:

{{Blockquote|At the age of about fourteen, he [Tartaglia] went to a Master Francesco to learn to write the alphabet; but by the time he reached “k,” he was no longer able to pay the teacher. “From that day,” he later wrote in a moving autobiographical sketch, “I never returned to a tutor, but continued to labour by myself over the works of dead men, accompanied only by the daughter of poverty that is called industry” (''Quesiti'', bk. VI, question 8).<ref>Masotti, Arnoldo, ''Niccolò Tartaglia'' in the ''Dictionary of Scientific Biography''.</ref>}}

Tartaglia moved to [[Verona]] around 1517, then to Venice in 1534, a major European commercial hub and one of the great centres of the Italian renaissance at this time. Also relevant is Venice's place at the forefront of European printing culture in the sixteenth century, making early printed texts available even to poor scholars if sufficiently motivated or well-connected — Tartaglia knew of Archimedes' work on the quadrature of the parabola, for example, from Guarico's Latin edition of 1503, which he had found "in the hands of a sausage-seller in Verona in 1531" (''in mano di un salzizaro in Verona, l'anno 1531'' in his words).<ref>See Tartaglia, Niccolò. [https://books.google.com/books?id=gk9ZAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA1-PR36 ''General Trattato di Numeri et Misure'', Part IV, Book 3, p. 43] for the sausage seller.</ref> Tartaglia's mathematics is also influenced by the works of medieval Islamic scholar [[Al-Khwarizmi|Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi]] from 12th Century Latin translations becoming available in Europe.<ref>Crossley, John N.; Henry, Alan S. (1990), Thus Spake al-Khwārizmī: A Translation of the Text of Cambridge University Library Ms. Ii.vi.5", Historia Mathematica, 17 (2): 103–131, doi:10.1016/0315-0860(90)90048-I</ref>

Tartaglia eked out a living teaching practical mathematics in [[abacus school]]s and earned a penny where he could:

{{quote|This remarkable man [Tartaglia] was a self-educated mathematics teacher who sold mathematical advice to gunners and architects, ten pennies one question, and had to litigate with his customers when they gave him a worn-out cloak for his lectures on Euclid instead of the payment agreed on.<ref>Zilsel, Edgar, ''The Social Origins of Modern Science'', p. 35.</ref>}}

He died in Venice.