Mathematics
1623 to 1662, Clermont-Ferrand, France
From the geometry of chance to the wager on God: a mathematician who weighed the vacuum, the odds, and the limits of reason itself.
Start learning Blaise →How a gambler’s puzzle - the ‘problem of points’ - drew Pascal and Fermat into the 1654 correspondence that founded probability theory, and gave the world its first rigorous grip on chance through the…
Pascal’s Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle : how one simple table of numbers unifies the binomial coefficients, combinations, and figurate numbers - and how, to prove one of its properties for infinitely many…
Pascal the physicist and engineer: the Pascaline calculating machine; the great Puy-de-Dôme experiment proving that the air has weight and that the vacuum can exist, against the ancient dogma that ‘nature ab…
Pascal turns reason on the probability of belief : the Provincial Letters demolish the lax ‘probabilism’ of the casuists, and the Wager of the Pensées applies the mathematics of expectation - which Pa…
The Pensées on the human condition: the being suspended between the infinitely large and the infinitely small; the ‘thinking reed,’ feeble yet aware; the heart that knows what reason cannot prove; and…
More in Mathematics
EuclidPythagorasAl-KhwarizmiAlan TuringGottfried LeibnizAryabhataHypatia of AlexandriaBrahmaguptaepoché — a humanities education that remembers you.