Who is he? What he was famous for?

Gerolamo Cardano of Padua, Italy who tried to teach his deaf son using written symbols.

in the history of education of the deaf, he said that deaf people were capable of using their minds, argued for the importance of teaching them, and was one of the first to state that deaf people could learn to read and write without learning how to speak first. He was familiar with a report by Rudolph Agricola about a deaf mute who had learned to write. From Wikipedia.

The son of Gerolamo was Giambattista, the eldest son in the family. Giambattista had other disabilities which were deaf in the right ear, small white restless eye, two toes in the left foot and a slightly hunched back as a deformity. He lived to the age of twenty-three years old. He married Brandonia di Seroni and borne him three children. Extract detail from the book online – The Book of My Life (De Vita Proprica Liber) by Gerolamo Cardano.

More to come later.