Peter Griffin, who had such a winning way with numbers that he unlocked the mathematics of blackjack and became a cult figure to a generation of casino card counters, died Oct. 18. Friends said the cause was prostate cancer.

Griffin, who wrote the authoritative "Theory of Blackjack," was 61. He had taught algebra and a good deal else as a professor of mathematics at California State University in Sacramento.

It is a tribute to Griffin's standing as a mathematical giant of blackjack, or 21, as the game is also known, that his book exploring and explaining the probabilities of every conceivable situation in the game was not published until 1979, 17 years after Edward Thorp's "Beat the Dealer" had presumably exhausted the subject, codifying the basic strategy and establishing that players could gain an actual statistical edge over the house by keeping track of cards as they were played and betting big when the remaining deck was rich in 10s and face cards. Griffin did not even play blackjack until January 1970, when, to gain practical experience for a proposed course on gambling mathematics, he paid a visit to Nevada and promptly got his clock cleaned. Like Thorp, who had had a similar experience in 1956, Griffin vowed revenge on the casinos.

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