Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a mathematical prodigy who invented a calculating machine at nineteen, founded probability theory with Fermat, and proved the existence of the vacuum against the Aristotelians. After a night of religious ecstasy in 1654, recorded on a paper sewn into his coat, he gave himself to Port-Royal and the Jansenist cause, writing The Provincial Letters against the Jesuits. The Pensées are the notes for an unfinished defence of Christianity, found in bundles after his death at thirty-nine, and contain the wager, the two infinities, and the thinking reed.