Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a child prodigy who built a mechanical calculator at nineteen, proved that vacuums exist before he was twenty-five, and co-founded probability theory with Fermat at thirty-one. After a religious experience later that same year, 1654, he devoted himself to the Jansenist community at Port-Royal and began drafting a defence of Christian faith. He died at thirty-nine with that defence unfinished, leaving thousands of paper scraps that his family assembled and published in 1670 as the Pensées. Because the book is a pile of fragments rather than a finished argument, it has been renumbered by every major editor since — which is precisely why Pascal quotes drift so easily in English.