In the early 1960s a mathematician sat at Nevada blackjack tables in wraparound sunglasses and a fake beard, quietly proving that the house could be beaten. This episode follows Edward O. Thorp from a tinkering childhood, when he became a certified ham radio operator at 12, through a physics degree and a 1958 PhD in mathematics at UCLA. As a professor he taught himself Fortran to run blackjack simulations on an IBM 704 and showed that the game has a memory: when low cards leave the deck, the odds tilt toward the player.

Thorp paired that insight with the Kelly criterion, a formula for sizing bets to grow a bankroll without courting ruin, then tested it with money from gambler Manny Kimmel. Casinos answered by shuffling early, so he moved on: first to roulette, where he and Claude Shannon built a hidden computer, and then to Wall Street. There he treated investor panic as a source of mispricing and pioneered the market neutral, quantitative approach to trading.

• Backed by $10,000 from Manny Kimmel, Thorp won $11,000 in a single weekend of casino play.
• His 1962 book Beat the Dealer sold more than 700,000 copies and took probability research straight to the public instead of an academic journal.
• The roulette device he built with Claude Shannon in 1960 and 1961 used a toe switch to time the ball and sent a tone to a hidden earpiece predicting where it would land.
• No law covered such machines when they used it, and Nevada did not ban electronic devices in casinos until 1985.
• Thorp ran Princeton Newport Partners from 1969 to 1989, reported a 20 percent average annual return over 28.5 years, and in 1991 judged Bernie Madoff’s results mathematically impossible.