Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand in France. He was one of the great mathematicians, physicists and Catholic philosophers of his time and grew up a child prodigy. He first studied the natural sciences and helped to invent the calculator. He studied liquids and helped to make sense of the ideas of vacuums and pressures. He was an ardent early advocate of the scientific method. Pascal penned a crucially important book on projective geometry when he was only sixteen and helped to develop probability theory in correspondence with Pierre de Fermat. He also helped to create modern economics.

Pascal was known for his religious and theological interests as well, including his advocacy of Jansenism, a movement within Catholicism that sought to integrate some of the theological insights of Calvinism. After his "second conversion" in 1654, he stopped doing math and science and focused on theology and philosophy...