He lived for just 39 years, yet Blaise Pascal was one of the most remarkable and creative figures of the seventeenth century.
He is known for his famous argument 'the wager', but there's so much more to him than that (and most people misunderstand the argument anyway). Pascal can lay claim not only to have built an early version of the modern computer, done ground-breaking work in mathematics and geometry and virtually invented probability theory, but also to have produced one of the most haunting and effective works of Christian apologetics ever written. He is a major intellectual figure at the beginning of the modern age who blends together in his own person and thinking issues that are crucial to our age. Blaise Pascal is therefore a crucial figure: not just in the history of European thought, but in how he can shed light on many contemporary debates.
