Bruno de Finetti, an Italian mathematician, was born in Innsbruck, Austria. On the death of his father, the six-year-old de Finetti and his mother moved to Trento (then in Austrian possession). At thirteen he suffered severe osteomyelitis in the left leg; surgery left him permanently lame. In 1923 he entered the Politecnico di Milano to study engineering, his father's and grandfather's profession. In his third year he transferred to the new University of Milan, from which he graduated in 1927 with a degree in applied mathematics. While still an undergraduate he published the first of a series of articles on Mendelian population genetics, developing the first mathematical model with overlapping generations.

From graduation until 1931 de Finetti worked at Rome's Istituto Centrale di Statistica. This was a period of intense and productive research, resulting in publication of a series of mathematical and foundational works on...