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Blaise Pascal

, Mathematician/Philosopher

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Born: 19 June 1623
Birthplace: Clermont-Ferrand, France
Died: 19 August 1662
Best Known As: 17th century mathematical genius

A prodigy in math, Blaise Pascal was a contemporary and rival of René Descartes. In spite of years of ill health and a short life, Pascal accomplished quite a bit: he published a significant work on the geometry of conical sections when he was only sixteen; he invented a calculating machine by the time he was nineteen; he and Pierre de Fermat founded the modern theory of probability; he described the principle that is the basis for the hydraulic press (called Pascal's Law); and he proved that there was a vacuum above the atmosphere. Pascal had a religious conversion in the 1650s and devoted himself to religion instead of science. He is famous for the philosophical theorem known as Pascal's Wager, and for the remark that history would have been different had Cleopatra's nose been differently shaped.

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Scientist: Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

Library of Congress

[b. Auvergne, France, June 19, 1623, d. Paris, August 19, 1662]

Pascal's scientific contributions include the principle of hydrostatics, now known as Pascal's law, which is the basis of the hydraulic press used in hydraulic brakes and other applications. In mathematics, he helped found probability theory and did important work with infinite series and the geometry of curves. In 1640 Pascal began developing a machine that could help his father -- a tax commissioner -- calculate taxes. The first working model appeared in 1642. Known today as the pascaline, it was the first mechanical calculator that used gears. He also is considered a major French philosopher and author for his book Pensées.

Biography: Blaise Pascal

The French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a precocious and influential mathematical writer, a master of the French language, and a great religious philosopher.

Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand on June 19, 1623. He was the son of étienne Pascal, king's counselor and later president of the Court of Aids at Clermont. Blaise's mother died in 1626, and he was left with his two sisters, Gilberte and Jacqueline. In 1631 the family moved to Paris.

Young Geometer

When Pascal was 12, he began attending meetings of a mathematical academy. His father taught him languages, especially Latin and Greek, but not mathematics. This ban on mathematics merely served to whet the boy's curiosity. He experimented with geometrical figures, inventing his own names for standard geometrical terms.

In 1640 the Pascal family moved to Rouen. There, still taught mainly by his father, Blaise worked with such intensity that his health deteriorated. Nevertheless, he had arrived at one of the most beautiful theorems in geometry. Sometimes called by him his "mystic hexagram," it is a theorem concerned with the collinearity of intersections of lines. It does not concern metrical properties of figures but is, in fact, at the very foundation of an important, and at the time almost entirely undeveloped, branch of mathematics - projective geometry. Pascal then set to work on a book, Essay on Conics, finished in 1640, in which the mystic hexagram was given central importance. It contained several hundred propositions on conic sections, bringing in the work of Apollonius and his successors, and was remarkable not only because of the writer's age (16) but also because of its treatment of tangency, among other things.

Jansenists and Port Royal

In 1646 Pascal's father had an accident and was confined to his house. He was visited by some neighbors who were Jansenists, a group formed by Cornelis Jansen, a Dutch-born professor of theology at Louvain. Their beliefs were contrary to the teachings of the Jesuits. The Pascals came under the influence of the Jansenists, with resultant fierce opposition to, and from, the Jesuits. Jacqueline wished to join the Jansenist convent at Port Royal. étienne Pascal disliked the idea and took the family away to Paris, but after his death in 1651 Jacqueline joined Port Royal. Pascal still enjoyed a more worldly life, having a number of aristocratic friends and a little more money to spend from his patrimony. In 1654, however, he was completely converted to Jansenism, and he commenced an austere life at Port Royal.

Provincial Letters

In 1655 Antoine Arnauld, a prolific writer in defense of Jansen, was formally condemned by the Sorbonne for heretical teaching, and Pascal took up his defense in the first part of the famous Provincial Letters. Their framework is that of a correspondence between a Parisian and a friend in the provinces from Jan. 13, 1656, to March 24, 1657. They were circulated in the thousands through Paris under a pseudonym (Louis de Montalte), and the Jesuits tried to discover the author, whose wit, reason, eloquence, and humor made the order a laughingstock.

The Pensées

Knowledge of Pascal's personal life is slight after his entry to Port Royal. His sister Gilberte tells of his asceticism, of his dislike of seeing her caress her children, and of his apparent revulsion from talk of feminine beauty. He suffered increasingly after 1658 from head pains, and he died on Aug. 19, 1662.

At his death Pascal left an unfinished theological work, the Pensées, an apology for Christianity, in effect, which was published 8 years later by the Port Royal community in a thoroughly garbled and incoherent form. A reasonably authentic version first appeared in 1844. It deals with the great problems of Christian thought, faith versus reason, free will, and preknowledge. Pascal explains the contradictions and problems of the moral life in terms of the doctrine of the Fall and makes faith and revelation alone sufficient for their mutual justification.

The Pensées, unlike the Provincial Letters, were not worked over and over by their author, and in style they would not, perhaps, mark him out as a great literary figure. The Letters, however, give Pascal a place in literary history as the first of several great French writers practicing the polite irony to which the language lends itself. The Pensées could almost have been written by another man, for in them reason is ostensibly made to take second place to religion. But they are both, in their different ways, among the great books in the history of religious thought.

Later Mathematical and Scientific Work

Pascal's writings on hydrostatics, relating his experiments with the barometer to his theoretical ideas on the equilibrium of fluids, were not published until a year after his death. His Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids extends Simon Stevin's analysis of the hydrostatic paradox and enunciates what may be called the final law of hydrostatics: in a fluid at rest the pressure is transmitted equally in all directions (Pascal's principle). Pascal is important as having forged links between the theories of liquids and gases, and between the dynamics of rigid bodies and hydrodynamics.

Pascal's principal contribution to mathematics after his entry to Port Royal related to problems associated with the cycloid - a curve, with the area of which the best mathematicians of the day were occupied. He published many of his theorems without proof, as a challenge to other mathematicians. Solutions were found by John Wallis, Christopher Wren, Christian Huygens, and others. Pascal published his own solutions under the assumed name of Amos Dettonville (an anagram of Louis de Montalte), and contemporary mathematicians often referred to him by this name.

The mathematical theory of probability made its first great step forward when a correspondence between Pascal and Pierre de Fermat revealed that both had come to similar conclusions independently. Pascal planned a treatise on the subject, but again only a fragment survived, to be published after his death. He never wrote at great length on mathematics, but the many short pieces which survive are almost always concise and incisive.

Further Reading

An excellent biography of Pascal is Jean Mesnard, Pascal: His Life and Works (1951; trans. 1952). Other studies of his life and work include Morris Bishop, Pascal: The Life of Genius (1936); Frank Thomas Herbert Fletcher, Pascal and the Mystical Tradition (1954); and Ernest Mortimer, Blaise Pascal: The Life and Work of a Realist (1959). Jack Howard Broome, Pascal (1966), is a lucid and practical introduction to Pascal's life and thought aimed at the beginner. It is a mark of Pascal's importance that most histories of this period of mathematics, science, or religion deal with his work at some length.

Political Dictionary: Blaise Pascal

(1623-62) French mathematician, scientist, and religious apologist. For Pascal, human misery is the result of the corruption of human nature at the Fall. Man without God is ruled by self-love which blinds him to true justice and is the origin of social and political disorders. Human greatness consists mainly in man's ability to realize his wretchedness. He may be a reed, but he is a ‘thinking reed’ (Pensées). But what can he do about it? Only an infinite being can save him from the social and political disorders that originate in his self-love, and help him to attain his aspirations. By implication Pascal is saying what Augustine said before him: true justice on earth can only be attained through faith in God and God is found in Jesus Christ.

Pascal was also one of the founders of the theory of probability and statistics. This originated with problems in gambling, but soon spread to serious applications in all the social sciences including politics (for some modern ramifications see also cost-benefit analysis; decision theory). His most famous argument in probability is ‘Pascal's Wager’ which has been described as a game-theoretic argument in favour of believing in God (or at least trying to believe, or going through the motions of believing). God either exists or He does not; if He exists He rewards believers with eternal life and punishes unbelievers with eternal punishment. Even if the probability of God's existence is very small, the penalty of eternal punishment is so devastating that the expected value of believing in God will always exceed that of not believing in Him. Given Pascal's premisses, the argument is valid; but all depends on God being the particular sort of God posited in the second premiss. However, the Wager is part of a broader argument that reasoning alone cannot lead to a knowledge of first principles. For Pascal, only religious belief can.

— Cyril Barrett

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Blaise Pascal

(born June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France — died Aug. 19, 1662, Paris) French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. The son of a mathematician, he was a child prodigy, earning the envy of René Descartes with an essay he wrote on conic sections in 1640. In the 1640s and '50s he made contributions to physics (formulating Pascal's law) and mathematics (working on the arithmetic triangle, inventing a calculating machine, and contributing to the advance of differential calculus). For work done in his early years, he is regarded as the founder of the modern theory of probability. At the same time, he became increasingly involved with Jansenism. Les Provinciales were a series of letters defending Jansenism and attacking the Jesuits. His great work of Christian apologetics, Apologie de la religion chrétienne, was never finished, but he put together most of his notes and fragments between 1657 and 1658; these were published posthumously as Pensées (1670). He returned to scientific work, contributing to the Élements de géométrie and publishing his findings on cycloid curves, but he soon returned to devotional life and spent his last years helping the poor. The pascal was named in his honour. See also Pascal's wager.

For more information on Blaise Pascal, visit Britannica.com.

French Literature Companion: Blaise Pascal

Pascal, Blaise (1623-62). One of the greatest advocates of Christian ideas, Pascal also displayed outstanding gifts as a mathematician, a scientist, a controversialist, and a literary stylist.

He was born in Clermont-en-Auvergne (now Clermont-Ferrand). His mother died when he was 3, and in 1631 his father, a member of the noblesse de robe, moved with his family to Paris and devoted himself increasingly to the education of Blaise and his two sisters, Gilberte and Jacqueline. Pascal eventually received a thorough grounding in Latin, mathematics, and science. He showed such intellectual precocity that in 1635 his father began taking him occasionally to the scientific academy recently founded by Mersenne. Partly inspired by a member of the group, Pascal published an Essai pour les coniques (1640) at the age of 16. In this short paper, intended as part of a larger Traité des coniques which remained unfinished, he moved from Euclidean to projective geometry while deducing certain conic properties. Later mathematical activity included work on the theory of probability, especially in his letters of 1654 to Fermat on ‘la règle des partis’ and in his Traité du triangle arithmétique of the same year. A series of later works on the mathematics of chance and on the cycloid are important in themselves and for the extent to which they anticipated the integral calculus.

At the end of 1639 Pascal's father had been appointed tax commissioner for Normandy. The family joined him in Rouen early in 1640, and the next six or seven years were very important in Pascal's life. Before long he had invented an ingenious mechanical calculating machine (‘la pascaline’) to aid his father with his fiscal computations. A machine was constructed, with the help of a mechanic in Rouen, in 1644, and a series of improved models followed up to 1652. It was also around this period that Pascal carried out much of his most important experimental work on the nature of the vacuum and on atmospheric pressure. The lively practicality of his mind was shown much later, some 18 months before his death, when he devised a system of cheap public transport for Paris—the so-called ‘carrosses à cinq sols’.

It was during the Rouen period that Pascal experienced what is sometimes called his ‘first conversion’. In January 1646 two amateur bone-setters, the brothers Deschamps Deslandes and Deschamps de la Bouteillerie, were treating his father for a hip injury. They were keen religious proselytizers, and succeeded in converting all members of the family to Jansenism. In the spring of 1647 Pascal became seriously ill (he suffered from very poor health for most of his life), and in the summer he and Jacqueline returned to Paris. They visited Port-Royal quite frequently and Jacqueline became a nun there, despite her brother's opposition, in 1652. It was also in 1652 that Pascal was to witness some of the worst battles of the Fronde; he later wrote that ‘le plus grand des maux est les guerres civiles’. After his illness Pascal's doctors had recommended that he seek more recreation, and he went through a brief ‘worldly’ period. He became increasingly intimate with the duc de Roannez and his sister Charlotte, while also maintaining an acquaintanceship with such socialites as the chevalier de Méré and the religious sceptic Damien Mitton. He is sometimes credited with a Discours sur les passions de l'amour said to have been written at this period. It seems unlikely that he was the author, however, or that it reflects a passionate relationship with Charlotte de Roannez (to whom he wrote letters of spiritual guidance in 1656).

The most decisive moment of Pascal's life came in 1654. On the night of 23 November he underwent an intense religious experience which brought him total conviction (of a kind inaccessible to the rational intellect alone) of God's reality and presence. Where the first conversion was essentially a matter of intellectual persuasion, this second experience brought a deep, inner transformation of a mystical kind. The ‘Mémorial’, a short ecstatic document in which he recorded his experience, was found, on his death, sewn into his doublet.

Meanwhile attacks on Jansenism increased, led by the Jesuits, and Antoine Arnauld's position in the Sorbonne became very insecure. A number of his Port-Royal friends turned to Pascal for support. He launched an immensely successful attack against the Jesuits in his 18 Lettres provinciales (January 1656-March 1657). This is one of the great polemical works of French literature, ranging in tone from ironical mockery to angry denunciation and using a number of very successful argumentational devices and tactics. Even Voltaire, no friend of Pascal or of Jansenism, admired and praised Pascal's rhetorical skill. The first four letters cleverly and amusingly reduce the theological jargon about grace, as used by the enemies of Jansenism, to meaningless self-contradiction. Between the third and fourth letters Arnauld was condemned and dismissed from the Sorbonne, but Pascal's campaign continued. Partly using material supplied by Nicole and Arnauld, he denounced Jesuit casuistry and moral laxity in letters 5 to 10. The remaining eight letters are chiefly designed to answer the counter-polemic which the first ten had provoked. The eleventh, for instance, contains a brilliant justification of the use of humour in defence of religion (the abbess of Port-Royal, Mère Angélique Arnauld, had been shocked by Pascal's tone). And the last two letters were a counter-attack against the king's confessor, the Jesuit père Annat. Official reaction to the Provinciales was severe. They were placed on the Index of forbidden books and burned by the Parlement of Aix. But they enjoyed great popular success and aroused much admiration, even among non-Jansenists.

In the Écrits des curés de Paris (1658), which Pascal wrote in collaboration with Arnauld and Nicole, a major topic in the Lettres provinciales—moral laxism—is the focus of an attack on Pirot's Apologie pour les casuistes. Pascal reopened the other main topic of the Lettres—the nature of grace—when he completed four important Écrits sur la grâce around the same period. It was probably in 1659, as he continued to suffer acute ill health, that he wrote his Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies. An important posthumously published document is the Entretien avec M. de Saci, which Le Maître de Sacy's secretary, Nicolas Fontaine, appears to have recorded as it took place and in which Pascal analyses the strengths and inadequacies of Epictetus' stoicism and Montaigne's scepticism.

There is no doubt that Pascal's greatest work remains the Pensées, which were posthumously published in 1670. This is a major exercise in Christian apologetics, even though it is mainly composed of notes and fragments jotted down in preparation for a systematic treatise which he did not live to complete. Since only a part of this material had been put into order by Pascal, there is much debate among editors concerning the intended design of his apologia. It is clear, however, that human nature is investigated in the Pensées at the psychological, social, metaphysical, and theological levels. In moral-psychological terms, Pascal finds in human beings a series of dramatic contradictions which, he argues, only the Christian doctrine of original sin can properly explain. At the social-political level, he points to the fragile nature of many social relationships and the unsatisfactoriness of the legal and political concepts of his day. Rather startlingly for the period, he holds social hierarchy to be based on arbitrariness rather than justice. As with his moral and social being, man's metaphysical nature is a source of dissatisfaction. He is a unique creature, but condemned to die in an infinite, impersonal universe. At all these levels, then, the picture of human beings is a dark and desperate one, but Pascal argues that when God is introduced at each level, the picture is transformed. The Pensées, therefore, use an analysis of the problem of human nature in order to interest the reader in the Christian solution. They seek to convince him or her further with evidence from the scriptures, miracles, Church history, etc. Above all, they insist that only faith which responds to God's grace, not purely intellectual enquiry, will explain human life properly and bring knowledge of God and true happiness.

Pascal remained conscious of the necessity—and difficulty—of interesting the libertin in these ideas. His famous pari, or wager, demonstrating that it is in our interest to bet on God's existence rather than against it, is usually seen not as a serious argument in itself but as an attempt to address the gambling libertin in language he will understand.

[John Cruickshank]

Bibliography

J. H. Broome, Pascal (1965)
J. Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal (1976)
R. Duchêne, L'Imposture littéraire dans les Provinciales de Pascal (1985)

Philosophy Dictionary: Blaise Pascal

Pascal, Blaise (1623-62) French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. A mathematical prodigy, Pascal published his discoveries on the theory of conic sections at the age of sixteen. He invented the first practicable calculating machine, in 1642, while his experimental and mathematical work on the barometer affords a model of mid-17th-century science and methodology. His celebrated correspondence with Pierre Fermat laid the basis of the modern theory of probability. Pascal's family were associated with the Jansenists of Port-Royal, where his sister was a nun. After a profound religious experience in 1654, Pascal turned to philosophy and theology. His Lettres provinciales are a defence of Arnauld against his Jesuit opponents, but in spite of his efforts the two Port-Royal convents were closed in 1661. De l'esprit géométrique contains Pascal's scientific and methodological philosophy, while the Pensées (1670) are an acknowledged classic of devotional literature. Both were published posthumously, and the latter, existing only in fragments, not given a definitive edition until 1952. Because of his prevailing scepticism, coupled, however, with a deep faith, Pascal has been compared to Kierkegaard as a leading example of religious conviction based on existential commitment and faith rather than on reason. Like Berkeley, Pascal had a deep concern for the poor, and founded the first ever public bus service, whose profits he gave to charity.

Columbia Encyclopedia: Pascal, Blaise

(blĕz päskäl') , 1623–62, French scientist and religious philosopher. Studying under the direction of his father, a civil servant, Pascal showed great precocity, especially in mathematics and science. Before he was 16 he wrote a paper on conic sections which won the respect of the mathematicians of Paris; at 19 he invented a calculating machine. Credited with founding the modern theory of probability, Pascal also discovered the properties of the cycloid and contributed to the advance of differential calculus. In physics his experiments increased knowledge of atmospheric pressure through barometric measurements and of the equilibrium of fluids (see Pascal's law). As a young man, Pascal came under the influence of Jansenism, and in 1651 his sister Jacqueline, who had also embraced Jansenist beliefs, entered the convent at Port-Royal, the center of the movement. As a result of the death of his father and of his own narrow escape from death, Pascal in 1654 experienced what he called a “conversion” and thereafter turned much of his attention to religion. When Antoine Arnauld, a noted Jansenist, was attacked by the Jesuits, Pascal championed him in his Lettre escrite à un provincial (1656). Those Provincial Letters, rendered into Latin, quickly circulated throughout Europe, and they still hold a leading place in the literature of polite irony. Pascal's religious writings were posthumously published as Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (1670). For a modern edition see Thoughts: An Apology for Christianity (tr. 1955). In the Pensées, famous both as a religious and philosophical classic, Pascal states his belief in the inadequacy of reason to solve man's difficulties or to satisfy his hopes. He preached instead the final necessity of mystic faith for true understanding of the universe and its meaning to man.

Bibliography

See biographies by A. J. Krailsheimer (1980), H. H. Davidson (1983); studies by E. Cailliet (1944, repr. 1973), R. Hazelton (1974), and S. E. Melzer (1986).

History 1450-1789: Blaise Pascal

Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662), French mathematician, scientist, religious polemicist, and apologist. Pascal was born in Clermont-en-Auvergne, where his mother died when he was three. He was educated with his two sisters by his father, and the family moved to Paris in 1631. Finding that the young Blaise had worked out the principles of geometry up to Euclid's thirty-second proposition, his father took him to the mathematical academy recently founded in Paris by Marin Mersenne. Influenced by the encounters he made there, Pascal published his first mathematical paper, the Essai sur les coniques (Essay on conic sections) in 1640. In this year, Pascal's father was appointed royal tax commissioner for Normandy, and the family established itself in Rouen. Looking to help his father with his accounting, Pascal invented the calculating machine two years later.

Following an accident in Rouen, Pascal's father was treated by two members of the Jansenist religious movement (which followed the theologian Cornelius Jansen in teaching a strict Augustinianism), and the entire family was influenced by Jansenist ideas about grace and piety. Pascal nonetheless turned, following a period of ill health during which he returned to Paris with his sister Jacqueline, to the "worldly" entertainments provided by fashionable Parisian society. His father died in 1651, and when Jacqueline subsequently became a nun at the Jansenist convent Port-Royal, Pascal opposed such commitment vigorously. It was not until the night of 23 November 1654 that he underwent a profound spiritual experience, coming to the absolute conviction that God had been revealed to him.

After this nuit de feu ('night of fire'), Pascal undertook a retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs, where he met Isaac Le Maistre de Saci (an account of their conversations was published posthumously in 1728 and is important for the insights it gives into Pascal's reading of the secular authors Montaigne and Epictetus). At this time, attacks on Jansenism were becoming increasingly frequent, with rival Jesuit theologians closely allied with the monarchy of Louis XIV. Antoine Arnauld was on the point of being condemned by the Sorbonne for his ongoing defense of Jansen's Augustinus. Certain other Jansenists (among them the philosopher Pierre Nicole) solicited Pascal's help; known only for his mathematical gifts, he was much less likely than they to be identified as the author of an attack on the Jesuits. Between January 1656 and March 1657 Pascal composed eighteen Lettres provinciales (Provincial letters), which launched a vicious offensive against Jesuit morality. The first ten letters constitute a dialogue between a naïve enquirer (presented as the writer of the letters), a friendly Jansenist, and some Jesuit priests. Through Pascal's diffusely ironic manipulation of these different personae, the Jesuits come across as absurd figures clinging to doctrine that is theologically unsound, especially on the subject of grace. In letters eleven through eighteen, all pretense of an exchange is dropped, and Pascal's speaker responds directly to the counterpolemic precipitated by the first ten letters. The last two letters are targeted specifically at Louis XIV's confessor, the Jesuit François Annat. Official reaction to the letters was uncompromising (they were placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1657), but general readers, unused to having complex theological debate laid out with such immediacy, were delighted and admiring.

Pascal reopened the main topic of the letters in four Écrits sur la grâce (Writings on grace) composed around 1658. During the same period, he gave an account to his friends at Port-Royal of a planned apology for the Christian religion. The fragments he jotted down, cut up, and arranged in bundles in preparation for this work, which he did not live to complete, are known as the Pensées (first edited and published in 1670). They are imbued with the Augustinian belief that the only way we can account for the dramatic contradictions found in human beings, who are wretched, yet capable of self-awareness, is through the doctrine of the Fall—once embodiments of divine perfection, humans distanced themselves from God at the moment of original sin. In the famous Fragment 199, "Disproportion of Man," which exploits the new science of the microscope and the telescope, humanity is depicted as lost between the infinitely large and infinitely small. Divertissement ('diversion') is any activity humanity turns to so as not to have to confront this metaphysical plight. The human faculty of reason can be useful (as evinced in the wager argument: we can deduce that we have nothing to lose by betting on the existence of God), but should accompany an awareness of its own limitations. Most important, these limitations can themselves be instructive, pointing to the need for faith. Pascal was fascinated by, rather than condemnatory toward, his fellow human beings and continually projected his own authorial voice into their different positions on the spectrum of belief. Having dedicated himself, from the moment of his conversion, to the advocacy of Christian ideas, he died at the home of his sister Gilberte on 19 August 1662.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated and with an introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1995.

——. Provincial Letters. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1967.

Secondary Sources

Hammond, Nicholas. Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal's Pensées. Oxford, 1994. Account of how the instability of the human condition manifests itself on the level of the language used in the Pensées.

Parish, Richard. Pascal's Lettres provinciales: A Study in Polemic. Oxford, 1989. Best available study of the themes and tactics employed in the Provincial Letters.

Sellier, Philippe. Pascal et saint Augustin. Paris, 1995. Invaluable and comprehensive account of Pascal's reading of St. Augustine.

—EMMA GILBY

Quotes By: Blaise Pascal

Quotes:

"Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary."

"We like to be deceived."

"Ugly deeds are most estimable when hidden."

"The struggle alone pleases us, not the victory."

"Earnestness is enthusiasm tempered by reason."

"Evil is easy, and has infinite forms."

See more famous quotes by Blaise Pascal

Wikipedia: Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal
Born	June 19 1623(1623--) Clermont-Ferrand, France
Died	August 19 1662 (aged 39) Paris, France

Blaise Pascal (pronounced [blɛːz paskal]), (June 19 1623 – August 19 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators, the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote powerfully in defense of the scientific method.

He was a mathematician of the first order. Pascal helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen and corresponded with Pierre de Fermat from 1654 and later on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.

Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he abandoned his scientific work and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées.

Pascal suffered from ill health throughout his life and died two months after his 39th birthday.

Early life and education

Born in Clermont-Ferrand, in the Auverne region of France, Blaise Pascal lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three. His father, Étienne Pascal (1588–1651), was a local judge and member of the petite noblesse, who also had an interest in science and mathematics. Blaise Pascal was brother to Jacqueline Pascal the youngest sibling and Gilberte, the eldest of the three.

In 1631, shortly after the death of his wife, Étienne Pascal moved with his children to Paris. Étienne, who never remarried, decided that he alone would educate his children, for they all showed extraordinary intellectual ability, particularly his son Blaise. The young Pascal showed an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science. At the age of eleven, he composed a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies and Étienne responded by forbidding his son to further pursue mathematics until the age of fifteen so as not to harm his study of Latin and Greek. One day, however, Étienne found Blaise (now twelve) writing an independent proof that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles with a piece of coal on a wall. From then on, the boy was allowed to study Euclid; perhaps more importantly, he was allowed to sit in as a silent on-looker at the gatherings of some of the greatest mathematicians and scientists in Europe—such as Roberval, Desargues, Mydorge, Gassendi, and Descartes—in the monastic cell of Père Mersenne.

An early Pascaline on display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work of Desargues on conic sections. Following Desargues's thinking, the sixteen-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a short treatise on what was called the "Mystic Hexagram" (conic sections), Essai pour les coniques ("Essay on Conics"). And sent it - his first serious work of mathematics—to Père Mersenne in Paris; it is known still today as Pascal's theorem. Briefly, it can be explained thus:

1. Take a cone

2. Take a simple plane and slice the cone in two going across.

3. If the plane is straight across, the section cut out will be a circle.

4. If the plane is at an angle, the section cut out will be an ellipse. This is the more general case, because ellipses can be squat or long, thin or nearly round: Because Pascal wanted to prove a general theorem, he took the case of an ellipse.

5. Draw a six sided figure inside the ellipse. The figure does not have to be regular, and may intersect itself.

6. Now take a pencil and make big dots on the vertices of the hexagram, and draw lines between the vertices. Then, extend the lines out to where they cross.

7. The three points of the intersections where the lines cross will always form a straight line, for any conic section and any hexagram.^[1]

Pascal's work was so precocious that Descartes, when shown the manuscript, refused to believe that the composition was not by the elder Pascal. When assured by Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son not the father, Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: "I do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics more appropriate than those of the ancients," adding, "but other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a sixteen-year-old child."^[2]

In France at that time offices and positions could be—and were—bought and sold. In 1631 Étienne sold his position as second president of the Cour des Aides for 65,665 livres.^[3] The money was invested in a government bond which provided if not a lavish then certainly a comfortable income which allowed the Pascal family to move to, and enjoy, Paris. But in 1638 Richelieu desperate for money to carry on the Thirty Year War found it by defaulting on the government's bonds. Suddenly Étienne Pascal's worth had dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than 7,300.

Like so many others, Étienne's opposition to the fiscal policies of Cardinal Richelieu eventually forced him to flee Paris, leaving his three children in the care of his neighbor Madame Sainctot, a great beauty with an infamous past who kept one of the most glittering and intellectual salons in all France. It was only when Jacqueline performed well in a children's play with Richelieu in attendance that Étienne was pardoned. In time Étienne was back in good graces with the cardinal, and in 1639 had been appointed the king's commissioner of taxes in the city of Rouen. A city whose tax records, thanks to uprisings, were in utter chaos.

In 1642, in an effort to ease his father's endless, exhausting calculations, and recalculations, of taxes owed and paid, Pascal, not yet nineteen, constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal's calculator or the Pascaline, to help his father with his work. The Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and the Zwinger museum in Dresden, Germany, exhibit one of his original mechanical calculators. Though these machines are early forerunners to computer engineering, the calculator failed to be a great commercial success. Because it was extraordinarily expensive the Pascaline became little more than a toy, and status symbol, for the very rich both in France and throughout Europe; however Pascal continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade and built fifty machines in total.

Contributions to mathematics

Portrait of Blaise Pascal

In addition to the childhood marvels previously mentioned, Pascal continued to influence mathematics throughout his life. In 1653, Pascal wrote his Traité du triangle arithmétique ("Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle") in which he described a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients, now called Pascal's triangle. In 1654, prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems, he corresponded with Fermat on the subject, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probabilities. The friend was the Chevalier de Méré, and the specific problem was that of two players who want to finish a game early and, given the current circumstances of the game, want to divide the stakes fairly, based on the chance each has of winning the game from that point. From this discussion, the notion of expected value was introduced. Pascal later (in the Pensées) used a probabilistic argument, Pascal's Wager, to justify belief in God and a virtuous life. The work done by Fermat and Pascal into the calculus of probabilities laid important groundwork for Leibniz's formulation of the infinitesimal calculus.^[4]

After a religious experience in 1654, Pascal mostly gave up work in mathematics. However, after a sleepless night in 1658, he anonymously offered a prize for the quadrature of a cycloid. Solutions were offered by Wallis, Huygens, Wren, and others; Pascal, under a pseudonym, published his own solution. Controversy and heated argument followed after Pascal announced himself the winner.

Philosophy of mathematics

Pascal's major contribution to the philosophy of mathematics came with his De l'Esprit géométrique ("On the Geometrical Spirit"), originally written as a preface to a geometry textbook for one of the famous "Little Schools of Port-Royal" (Les Petites-Ecoles de Port-Royal). The work was unpublished until over a century after his death. Here, Pascal looked into the issue of discovering truths, arguing that the ideal of such a method would be to found all propositions on already established truths. At the same time, however, he claimed this was impossible because such established truths would require other truths to back them up—first principles, therefore, cannot be reached. Based on this, Pascal argued that the procedure used in geometry was as perfect as possible, with certain principles assumed and other propositions developed from them. Nevertheless, there was no way to know the assumed principles to be true.

Pascal also used De l'Esprit géométrique to develop a theory of definition. He distinguished between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer and definitions which are within the language and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their referent. The second type would be characteristic of the philosophy of essentialism. Pascal claimed that only definitions of the first type were important to science and mathematics, arguing that those fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism as formulated by Descartes.

In De l'Art de persuader ("On the Art of Persuasion"), Pascal looked deeper into geometry's axiomatic method, specifically the question of how people come to be convinced of the axioms upon which later conclusions are based. Pascal agreed with Montaigne that achieving certainty in these axioms and conclusions through human methods is impossible. He asserted that these principles can only be grasped through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths.

Contributions to the physical sciences

Pascal's work in the fields of the study of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press (using hydraulic pressure to multiply force) and the syringe. By 1646, Pascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli's experimentation with barometers. Having replicated an experiment which involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl of mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in the tube and what filled the space above the mercury in the tube. At the time, most scientists contended that, rather than a vacuum, some invisible matter was present. This was based on the Aristotelian notion that creation was a thing of substance, whether visible or invisible; and this substance was forever in motion. Furthermore, "Everything that is in motion must be moved by something," Aristotle declared.^[5] Ergo, to the Aristotelian trained scientists of Pascal's time, a vacuum was an impossibility. How so? As proof it was pointed out:

Light passed through the so-called "vacuum" in the glass tube.
Aristotle wrote how everything moved, and must be moved by something.
Therefore, since there had to be an invisible "something" to move the light through the glass tube, there was no vacuum in the tube. Not in the glass tube or anywhere else. Vacuums—the absence of any and every thing—were simply an impossibility.

Following more experimentation in this vein, in 1647 Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide ("New Experiments with the Vacuum"), which detailed basic rules describing to what degree various liquids could be supported by air pressure. It also provided reasons why it was indeed a vacuum above the column of liquid in a barometer tube.

On September 19, 1648, after many months of Pascal's friendly but insistent prodding, Florin Périer, husband of Pascal's elder sister Gilberte, was finally to carry out the fact finding mission vital to Pascal's theory. The account, written by Périer, reads:

"The weather was chancy last Saturday...[but] around five o'clock that morning...the Puy-de-Dôme was visible...so I decided to give it a try. Several important people of the city of Clermont has asked me to let them know when I made the ascent...I was delighted to have them with me in this great work...

"...at eight o'clock we met in the gardens of the Minim Fathers, which has the lowest elevation in town....First I poured sixteen pounds of quicksilver...in to a vessel...then took several glass tubes..each four feet long and hermetically sealed at one end and opened at the other...then placed them in the vessel [of quicksilver]...I found the quick silver stood at 26" and 3½ lines above the quicksilver in the vessel...I repeated the experiment two more times while standing in the same spot...[they] produced the same result each time...

"I attached one of the tubes to the vessel and marked the height of the quicksilver and...asked Father Chastin, one of the Minim Brothers...to watch if any changes should occure through the day...Taking the other tube and a portion of the quick silver...I walked to the top of Puy-de-Dôme, about 500 fathoms higher than the monastery, where upon experiment...found that the quicksilver reached a height of only 23" and 2 lines...I repeated the experiment five times with care...each at different points on the summit...found the same height of quicksilver...in each case..."^[6]

Pascal replicated the experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up to the top of the bell tower at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a height of about fifty meters. The mercury dropped two lines. These, and other lesser experiments carried out by Pascal, were hailed throughout Europe as establishing the principle and value of the barometer.

In the face of criticism that some invisible matter must exist in Pascal's empty space, Pascal, in his reply to Estienne Noel, gave one of the seventeenth century's major statements on the scientific method: "In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a single one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity." His insistence on the existence of the vacuum also led to conflict with a number of other prominent scientists, including Descartes.

Adult life, religion, philosophy, and literature

“

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.

”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #72

Religious conversion

Pascal studying the cycloid, by Augustin Pajou, 1785, Louvre

Biographically, two basic influences led him to his conversion: sickness and Jansenism. From as early as his eighteenth year, Pascal suffered from a nervous ailment that left him hardly a day without pain. In 1647, a paralytic attack so disabled him that he could not move without crutches. His head ached, his bowels burned, his legs and feet were continually cold, and required wearisome aids to circulation of the blood; he wore stockings steeped in brandy to warm his feet. Partly to get better medical treatment, he moved to Paris with his sister Jacqueline. His health improved, but his nervous system had been permanently damaged. Henceforth, he was subject to deepening hypochondria, which affected his character and his philosophy. He became irritable, subject to fits of proud and imperious anger, and seldom smiled.^[7]

In the winter of 1646, Pascal's 58 year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell on an icy street of Rouen; given the man's age and the state of medicine in the 17th century, a broken hip could be very serious, perhaps even fatal, condition. Fortunately at the time Rouen was home to two of the finest doctors in France: Monsieur Doctor Deslandes, and Monsieur Doctor de La Bouteillerie. The elder Pascal "would not let anyone other than these men attend him...It was a good choice, for the old man survived and was able to walk again..."^[8] But treatment and rehabilitation took three months, during which time La Bouteillerie and Deslandes were live-in guests at the Pascal household.

Both men were followers of Jean Guillebert, proponent of a splinter group of the main body of Catholic teaching known as Jansenius. This belief, which, though still fairly small, was making surprising headroads into French catholics, espoused a far stricter, near-Calvinistic/Augustinian style of belief than that of the more traditional, more lenient Catholicism of Thomas Aquinas. Blaise spoke with the doctor frequently, and upon his successful treatment of Étienne, borrowed works by Jansenist authors through him. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort of "first conversion" and began in the course of the following year to write on theological subjects.

Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what he called a "worldly period" (1648–54). His father died in 1651, and Pascal gained control over both his inheritance as well as his sister Jacqueline who announced that she intended to become a postulant in the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal by the first of the year. Pascal was horrified, not because of her choice, but because due to his life-long poor health he too needed her.

"Suddenly there was war in the Pascal household. Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn't work, either.At the heart of this was...Blaise's fear of abandonment...if Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, she would have to leave her inheritance behind...[but] nothing would change her mind."^[9]

By the end of October 1651 a truce had been reached between brother and sister: in return for a respectable annual stipend, Jacqueline signed over inheritance to her brother. (Their eldest sister Gilberte had already been given her inheritance in the form of a handsome dowery.) On 04 January, Jacqueline left for Port-Royal. On that day, according to Gilberte, "He retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little parlor..."^[10] On 05 June, 1653, after what must have seemed like endless badgering on the part of Jacqueline, Pascal formally signed over the whole of his sister's inheritance to Port-Royal, which, by this time "had begun to smell like a cult."^[11] With two-thirds of his father's estate now gone, the 29 year-old Pascal was now consigned to genteel poverty. Jacqueline vowed a life of poverty. Pascal teetered on the brink of living one.

But Time is the best physician. For an exciting while Pascal pursued the life of a foot-loose bachelor, even going so far as giving merry chase while in Auvergne to a lady of beauty and learning, whom he referred to as the "Sappho of the countryside."^[12] Around this time, Pascal wrote Discours sur les passions de l'amour ("Conversation about the Passions of Love"), and apparently he contemplated marriage — which he was later to describe as "the lowest of the conditions of life permitted to a Christian."^[13] Jacqueline reproached him for his frivolity and prayed for his reform. During visits to his sister at Port-Royal in 1654, he displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not drawn to God.^[14]

Brush with death

On November 23 1654, Pascal is said to have been involved in an accident at the Neuilly-sur-Seine bridge where the horses plunged over the parapet and the carriage nearly followed them. Fortunately, the reins broke and the coach hung halfway over the edge. Pascal and his friends emerged unscathed, but the sensitive philosopher, terrified by the nearness of death, fainted away and remained unconscious for some time. Upon recovering fifteen days later, between ten thirty and twelve thirty at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars…" and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He seems to have carefully sewn this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a servant discovered it only by chance after his death.^[15] This piece is now known as the Memorial. During his lifetime, Pascal was often mistakenly thought to be a libertine, and was later dismissed as an individual who had only made a deathbed conversion. The story of the carriage accident as having led to the experience described in the Memorial is disputed by some scholars ^[16].

His belief and religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655. For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the Provincial Letters.

The Provincial Letters

Main article: Lettres provinciales

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Beginning in 1656, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, a popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period (especially the Jesuits). Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity. His method of framing his arguments was clever: the Provincial Letters pretended to be the report of a Parisian to a friend in the provinces on the moral and theological issues then exciting the intellectual and religious circles in the capital. Pascal, combining the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world, reached a new level of style in French prose. The 18-letter series was published between 1656 and 1657 under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV. The king ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in 1660. In 1661, the Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved with the school had to sign a 1656 papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. The final letter from Pascal, in 1657, had defied the Pope himself, provoking Alexander VII to condemn the letters. But that didn't stop all of educated France from reading them. Even Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments. He condemned "laxism" in the church and ordered a revision of casuistical texts just a few years later (1665–66).

Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The first few letters promote major principles of Jansenist teaching, such as the dogmas of "proximate power" (Letter I) and "sufficient grace" (Letter II), and explain why they are not heretical. The later letters find Pascal more on the defensive—pressure on the Port Royal Jansenists to renounce their teachings was constantly growing through this time—and contain the assault on casuistry. Letter XVI contains the unique apology, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

Wide praise has been given to the Provincial Letters. Voltaire called the Letters "the best-written book that has yet appeared in France."^[17] And when Bossuet was asked what book he would rather have written had he not written his own, he answered, the Provincial Letters of Pascal.^[18]

Miracle

When Pascal was back in Paris just after overseeing the publication of the last Letter, his religion was reinforced by the close association to an apparent miracle in the chapel of the Port-Royal nunnery. His 10-year-old niece, Marguerite Périer, was suffering from a painful fistula lacrymalis that exuded noisome pus through her eyes and nose—an affliction the doctors pronounced hopeless. Then, on March 24, 1657, a believer presented to Port-Royal what he and others claimed to be a thorn from the crown that had tortured Christ. The nuns, in solemn ceremony and singing psalms, placed the thorn on their altar. Each in turn kissed the relic, and one of them, seeing Marguerite among the worshippers, took the thorn and with it touched the girl's sore. That evening, we are told, Marguerite expressed surprise that her eye no longer pained her; her mother was astonished to find no sign of the fistula; a physician, summoned, reported that the discharge and swelling had disappeared. He, not the nuns, spread word of what he termed a miraculous cure. Seven other physicians who had had previous knowledge of Marguerite's fistula signed a statement that in their judgment a miracle had taken place. The diocesan officials investigated, came to the same conclusion, and authorized a Te Deum Mass in Port-Royal. Crowds of believers came to see and kiss the thorn; all of Catholic Paris acclaimed a miracle. Later, both Jansenists and Catholics used this well-documented miracle to their defense. In 1728, Pope Benedict XIII referred to the case as proving that the age of miracles had not passed.

Pascal made himself an armorial emblem of an eye surrounded by a crown of thorns, with the inscription Scio cui credidi—"I know whom I have believed."^[19] His beliefs renewed, he set his mind to write his final, unfinished testament, the Pensées.

The Pensées

Main article: Pensées

Unfortunately, Pascal could not finish his most influential theological work, the Pensées ("Thoughts"), before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination of and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). What was found upon sifting through his personal items after his death were numerous scraps of paper with isolated thoughts, grouped in a tentative, but telling, order. The first version of the detached notes appeared in print as a book in 1670 titled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. Because his friends and the scholars at Port-Royal were concerned that these fragmentary "thoughts" might lead to skepticism rather than to piety, they concealed the skeptical pieces and modified some of the rest, lest King or Church should take offense^[20] for at that time the persecution of Port-Royal had ceased, and the editors were not interested in a renewal of controversy. Not until the nineteenth century were the Pensées published in their full and authentic text.

Pascal's Pensées is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in French prose. When commenting on one particular section (Thought #72), Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language.^[21] Will Durant, in his 11-volume, comprehensive The Story of Civilization series, hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French prose."^[22] In Pensées, Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes: infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity—seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace. Rolling these into one he develops Pascal's Wager.

Last works and death

Pascal's epitaph in Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, where he was buried

T. S. Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world." Pascal's ascetic lifestyle derived from a belief that it was natural and necessary for man to suffer. In 1659, Pascal, whose health had never been good, fell seriously ill. During his last years, he frequently tried to reject the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Sickness is the natural state of Christians."^[23]

Louis XIV suppressed the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal in 1661. In response, Pascal wrote one of his final works, Écrit sur la signature du formulaire ("Writ on the Signing of the Form"), exhorting the Jansenists not to give in. Later that year, his sister Jacqueline died, which convinced Pascal to cease his polemics on Jansenism. Pascal's last major achievement, returning to his mechanical genius, was inaugurating perhaps the first bus line, moving passengers within Paris in a carriage with many seats.

In 1662, Pascal's illness became more violent. Aware that his health was fading quickly, he sought a move to the hospital for incurable diseases, but his doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried. In Paris on August 18, 1662, Pascal went into convulsions and received extreme unction. He died the next morning, his last words being "May God never abandon me," and was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.^[24]

An autopsy performed after his death revealed grave problems with his stomach and other organs of his abdomen, along with damage to his brain. Despite the autopsy, the cause of his continual poor health was never precisely determined, though speculation focuses on tuberculosis, stomach cancer, or a combination of the two.^[25] The headaches which afflicted Pascal are generally attributed to his brain lesion.

Legacy

In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics), and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.

Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics. Originally applied to gambling, today it is extremely important in economics, especially in actuarial science. John Ross writes, "Probability theory and the discoveries following it changed the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, and an individual's and society's ability to influence the course of future events." [2] However, it should be noted that Pascal and Fermat, though doing important early work in probability theory, did not develop the field very far. Christiaan Huygens, learning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the subject. Later figures who continued the development of the theory include Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace.

In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists. The content of his literary work is best remembered for its strong opposition to the rationalism of René Descartes and simultaneous assertion that the main countervailing philosophy, empiricism, was also insufficient for determining major truths.

Other

In France, a prestigious annual competition is held for outstanding international scientists to conduct their research in t