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Blaise Pascal: Man
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Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Although he is best known to online roulette players as the inventor of the roulette wheel, that was actually only one of his many brilliant accomplishments.
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Pascal ... investigated the cycloid—the curve formed by a point on the circumference of a circle as the circle rolls along a straight line. Pascal’s discovery of many physical and mathematical properties of the cycloid was an important step towards the later development of calculus by others.
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Pascal is appalled that people think this way, and he wants to shake people out of their stupor and make them think about eternity. Thus, the condition of man is his starting point for moving people toward a genuine knowledge of God.
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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]
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Pascal was a man before his time. He saw where Descartes' rationalism would lead man. When pure rationalism (which characterized much of modern philosophy) failed to produce the answers expected of it, it eventually collapsed into skepticism and irrationalism (post-modernism). This was due to the failure to recognize the limits of reason.
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Pascal appears to have had no formal education. As a young child his father took charge of his education. He continued his education in the salons and scientific gatherings he attended with his father as a young man in Paris.
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