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Blaise Pascal: Life
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The short life of Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was one of intense intellectual brilliance, physical anguish, and mystical vision. The son of a French bureaucrat, Pascal exhibited extraordinary mathematical and scientific abilities at an early age.
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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.
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Blaise embarked upon a life of religious devotion and strict austerity yet his resolution was not immediately reduced to practice. He continued his research, plunging into Physics, and through some ingenious experiments he demonstrated the existence of the vacuum and the weight of air. Simultaneously he advanced the principles of a truly modern scientific philosophy based on primary reliance upon the experiment. Thus Pascal completed the break between true science and metaphysics.
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With his sister's affairs settled, Pascal found himself both rich and free. He took a sumptuously furnished home, staffed it with many servants, and drove about Paris in a coach behind four or six horses. His leisure was spent in the company of wits, women, and gamblers (as evidenced by his work on probability). For an exciting while, he pursued in Auvergne a lady of beauty and learning, whom he referred to as the "Sappho of the countryside." [3] 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." [4]
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Pascal continued to enjoy a more worldly life. He had a number of aristocratic (upper-class) and famous friends and money from his patrimony (inheritance) to support himself. In 1654... he completely converted to Jansenism, and joined his sister at the convent at Port Royal.
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Pascal therefore devised a mathematical formula for determining the probability that each player would have won if the game had been played to its conclusion. This is the essence of probability theory: establishing the numerical odds of a future event occurring or not occurring with mathematical precision. Pascal's theory of probability is used today in virtually every area of modern life.
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