Swiss mathematician and physicist born in 1654 in Basel, Switzerland. Although his father urged him to become a theologian, he secretly studied mathematics and in 1687 became professor of mathematics at the University of Basel. His book Ars Conjectandi, which was published in 1713, 8 years after his death, significantly contributed to the development of probability theory. He made a significant contribution to the development of the early theory of permutations and combinations. He is known for the so-called Bernoulli numbers.