Born in 1623 in France, Blaise Pascal spent his youth being privately tutored at home by his father. The elder Pascal banished mathematics texts from the house to ensure the boy first focused on languages, but by age 12, young Blaise had secretly invented his own terminology and independently discovered nearly all the geometric proofs of Euclid. His mathematical genius only grew from there. At 16, he produced an essay on conic sections so advanced that the famed philosopher Rene Descartes was convinced his father must have ghostwritten it; by 19, he had designed and built a mechanical calculator known as the “Pascaline.” Pascal went on to publish papers and conduct experiments on everything from fluid mechanics and perpetual motion to atmospheric pressure and the philosophy of religion. Before his death at the age of 39, he developed his famous “Pascal’s Wager,” which uses probability theory to argue for belief in God.
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