Nicolaus Bernoulli was a prolific correspondent and poser of the St Petersburg Paradox, solved by his cousin Daniel Bernoulli. He was a nephew of Jacob Bernoulli, who supervised his Master’s degree in mathematics at U Basel. He was awarded his PhD at Basel in 1709 for a study of the application of probability theory to legal problems. In 1716 he was appointed to Galileo’s chair at U Padua. In 1722 he left Italy and returned to U Basel, as Professor of Logic and later Professor of Law.