Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor and religious thinker. A prodigy educated by his father, he wrote on conic sections as a teenager, built one of the first mechanical calculators to help his father with tax accounts, and with Fermat laid the foundations of probability theory; his experiments on the vacuum and atmospheric pressure gave his name to a unit of pressure. After a mystical experience on the night of November 23, 1654, which he recorded on a paper sewn into his coat, he drew close to the Jansenists of Port-Royal, defended them in The Provincial Letters and left the notes published as the Pensées.