Blaise Pascal 1623 – 1662

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and Christian philosopher who made foundational contributions to projective geometry, probability theory, and hydrostatics. After a religious experience in 1654 he turned increasingly to theological and philosophical writing in defense of Jansenist Catholicism. The Provincial Letters dismantled what he took to be the moral laxity of Jesuit casuistry, while the posthumous Pensees, a collection of fragments toward an apologetic, contains his celebrated wager and a profound meditation on the misery and grandeur of the human condition.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher whose short life produced some of the most distinctive seventeenth-century work in each field. Born in Clermont-Ferrand to a tax collector and amateur mathematician, he was educated at home by his father and made his first major mathematical discoveries — the Pascal triangle, work on conic sections, the foundations of probability theory in correspondence with Fermat — in his teens and twenties.

Pascal's adult life was reshaped by religious conversion. In 1654 a profound religious experience — recorded on a parchment he carried sewn into his coat for the rest of his life — committed him to the austere Jansenist Catholicism of Port-Royal. The Provincial Letters (1656–1657), a series of pseudonymous polemical letters written in defense of the Jansenists against the Jesuits, are masterpieces of French prose and philosophical satire. The Pensées — fragments of an unfinished philosophical-religious apology, published posthumously — contain the famous Wager, the analysis of the human condition between greatness and misery, and the distinction between the heart's reasons and reason's reasons.

Pascal continued making scientific contributions through his religious period — the calculating machine, work on the vacuum and atmospheric pressure, the founding of the world's first urban public transit system in Paris. He died in 1662 at thirty-nine, of complications likely related to a long-standing gastrointestinal condition.