Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French prodigy who packed several careers into a short, intense life: mathematician, physicist, inventor, and eventually a fiery religious philosopher. He built a working mechanical calculator as a teenager and helped invent probability theory — then largely abandoned maths to write about faith. He died at just 39.
Pascal's triangle — that endless pyramid of numbers where each entry is the sum of the two
above it — hands you the coefficients of the
Pascal turned his own probability thinking on the biggest question he could imagine, in what we now call "Pascal's Wager": he argued that believing in God is the rational bet, because the possible payoff is infinite while the cost of being wrong is small. Whatever you make of the theology, it's a striking early example of decision-making under uncertainty — using the maths of gambling to reason about the meaning of life. Not bad for a man who also built a calculator to help his tax-collector father with sums.