Francesco Cantelli was born on December 20, 1875 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy and educated at the University of Palermo. Cantelli's early work was in astronomy and celestial mechanics, but later, his interests turned to probability and its applications, particularly to economics. He was the founder of Istituto Italiano degli Attuari, for the application of probability to economics, and was a professor at the University of Rome.
In probability, Cantelli's name, along with Emil Borel, is associated with the famous Borel-Cantelli lemmas that give conditions for the occurrence of infinitely many events to have probability 0 or 1. Cantelli died on July 21, 1966 in Rome.