Blaise Pascal

Pascal was born in Clermont in 1623 and was educated at home by a father who recognized his gifts. By his teens he was corresponding with mathematicians; by his early twenties he had built a calculating machine and, with Fermat, laid the foundations of probability.

He studied the vacuum and fluid pressure, wrote on the geometry of conic sections, and helped establish the calculus of probabilities. In 1654 a religious experience turned him toward theology, and he began the fragmentary defence of Christianity published after his death as the Pensées, whose argument for faith by the stakes involved is known as the wager.

He wrote the Provincial Letters in defence of Jansenism, quarrelled with the Jesuits, and died in Paris in 1662 at thirty-nine, leaving notes that became one of the most quoted books in French.

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