Mathematician & Philosopher
Blaise Pascal
The teenage geometer who solved a gambling dispute by letter — then walked away from mathematics to bet his life on God instead
In the summer of 1654, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat exchanged five letters working out how to fairly divide the stakes of an interrupted gambling game -- the correspondence usually credited as the birth of probability theory. This bio also covers the Pascaline mechanical calculator he built as a teenager, his law of hydrostatic pressure, the religious conversion that turned him away from mathematics almost entirely, and Pascal's Wager, the piece of expected-value reasoning he built out of the same probabilistic thinking that founded his mathematical legacy.