Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont, France. His mother died when he was three, and his father, a tax official and amateur mathematician, educated him at home. Pascal showed astonishing talent: at sixteen he wrote an essay on conic sections, and at nineteen he invented a mechanical calculator to help his father with his work. He experimented with air pressure, showing with a barometer carried up a mountain that air pressure falls with height, and stated Pascal's principle about pressure in fluids. With Pierre de Fermat he founded the mathematics of probability. On the night of 23 November 1654 he had an intense religious experience, which he wrote down and sewed into his coat; it began with the word Fire. He drew close to the Jansenists at Port-Royal and wrote the Provincial Letters, a witty attack on Jesuit moral teaching. He planned a great defense of Christianity, and the notes for it, published after his death as the Pensées, include his famous wager. He also started a public carriage service in Paris. Long in poor health, he died in 1662 at thirty-nine.

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Faith: A Catholic who in November 1654 had an ecstatic experience he interpreted as a religious conversion. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy