When was blaise pascal born and died

Following the accident, the Deschamps brothers, who had bone-setting and nursing skills, came to live in the Pascal household at Rouen for three months. Jansen recommended that Christians should turn aside from the pride and concupiscence of human knowledge and scientific investigations, and that they should concentrate exclusively on knowledge of God. While this encounter with Jansenist theology is sometimes described as Pascal's first conversion, it is unlikely that he had already made the definitive choice about the insignificance of mathematical and scientific work that characterised his change of heart in the s.

He returned to Paris with his sister, Jacqueline, in The return to Paris was followed within a few years by a radical change in the emotional and nursing support that Blaise Pascal had enjoyed since his earliest years. However, his younger sister, Jacqueline, who had continued to act as his personal assistant, expressed a desire, in May , to become a nun.

She wanted to enter the Port-Royal convent in Paris, which was under the spiritual supervision of Jansenists and in which one of Arnauld's sisters was a prominent Abbess. However, four months after her father's death in , and despite her brother's opposition, Jacqueline Pascal joined Port-Royal. Then, for the first time in his life, Blaise Pascal was alone and still in poor health. He soon began to accept spiritual guidance from his sister Jacqueline and subsequently from a prominent Jansenist, Antoine Singlin — In the summer of , Pascal returned briefly to mathematics in correspondence with Pierre Fermat —65 about calculating probabilities associated with gambling.

In fact, as Edwards explains Hammond, Chapter 3 , Pascal's contribution to probability theory was not recognised until it was used by Bernoulli in the early eighteenth century. During the night of 23 November , Pascal had a dreamlike or ecstatic experience which he interpreted as a religious conversion.

He wrote a summary of the experience in a brief document entitled the Memorial , which he sewed into his coat and carried with him until his death eight years later. The intensity of this experience resulted in a definitive change in Pascal's lifestyle, in his intellectual interests, and in his personal ambitions. After , he terminated the mathematical discussions about which he had correspondended with Fermat, and he cancelled plans to publish a booklet on the vacuum that was ready to go into print.

Pascal had entered the final period of his life, which was dominated by religious controversy, continual illness, and loneliness. This was also the period in which he assumed the challenge of defending Arnauld and, more generally, Jansenist theology in the Provincial Letters.

Following the condemnation by Pope Innocent X May of five propositions about grace that were allegedly found in Jansen's posthumously published book, Augustinus , Arnauld was threatened with censure by the Theology Faculty at the Sorbonne. This provoked Pascal to write a series of open letters, between January and March , which were published one by one under a pseudonym and became known as the Provincial Letters. They purported to inform someone living outside Paris in the provinces about the events that were newsworthy in theological debates at the Sorbonne and, more widely, in the Catholic Church in France.

The Letters rely on satire and ridicule as much as on logic or argument to persuade readers of the justice of Arnauld's cause and of the unsustainability of his critics' objections. However, despite Pascal's efforts, Arnauld was expelled from the Sorbonne February Those who lived at Port-Royal des Champs — another convent associated with Port-Royal, which was outside the city boundaries — agreed to leave voluntarily March under threat of forcible expulsion, and the convent was eventually razed to the ground.

The Provincial Letters are Pascal's deeply personal, angry response to the use of political power and church censure to decide what he considered to be a matter of fact, and to what he perceived as the undue influence of a lax, secular Jesuit morality on those who held political and ecclesiastical power in France. The Jesuits were not members of the Sorbonne and were not officially involved in Arnauld's censure; it is not immediately clear, therefore, why Pascal, in the course of writing the letters, devoted so much energy to criticizing the Jesuits.

He may have blamed their influence in Rome and their political connections with the monarchy in France for Arnauld's censure.

The final years of Pascal's life were devoted to religious controversy, to the extent that his increasingly poor health permitted. During this period, he began to collect ideas and to draft notes for a book in defence of the Catholic faith. While his health and premature death partly explain his failure to realise that ambition, one might also suspect that an inherent contradiction in the project's design would have made its implementation impossible.

Apologetic treatises in support of Christianity traditionally used reasons to support religious faith e. Pascal had collected his notes into bundles or liasses before he died, and had provided tentative titles for each bundle; however, these notes gave no indication of the order in which they should be read, either within a given bundle or even between various bundles, and subsequent editors failed to agree on any numbering system for the posthumously published notes. They are reliably attributed to Pascal only when he expressed similar views elsewhere.

Cole , Chapter 15 argues that Pascal exhibited signs of manic depression and an almost infantile dependence on his family in his mature years. In addition, many of the reported details of his personal life suggest a fundamentalist interpretation of religious belief that is difficult to reconcile with the critical reflection that defines philosophy as a discipline.

For example, his sister's Life recorded that Pascal had an almost obsessive repugnance to any expression of emotional attachment, which Gilberte attributed to his high regard for the virtue of modesty.

Pascal believed uncritically that God performs miracles, among which he included the occasion when his niece was cured of a serious eye condition and the cure was attributed to what was believed to be a thorn from the passion of Christ. In general, Pascal's commitment to Jansenism was unqualified, although he denied in the Provincial Letters that he was a member of Port-Royal I, Everything we know about Pascal during his maturity points to a single-minded, unwavering belief in the exclusive truth of a radical theological position that left no room for alternative religious perspectives, either within Christianity or outside it.

This is not to suggest that it is impossible to be a religious believer and a philosopher; there are too many obvious counterexamples to such a suggestion. However, the intensity of Pascal's religious faith, following his conversion, seems to have made philosophical inquiries irrelevant to him, with the result that he approached all questions during the final ten years of his life almost exclusively from the perspective of his religious faith.

There is a complementary reason for urging caution about reading Pascal as a philosopher. He wrote much but published little, none of which was philosophy in the sense in which that term is used today [see section 6]. Apart from his brief essays on the vacuum and the Provincial Letters , all his writings were edited and amended posthumously by collaborators who were still involved in the theological controversies that had dominated Pascal's later life. For example, he seems to have contributed to an early version of the Port-Royal Logic Arnauld and Nicole, that was subsequently published in ; and the Entretien avec M.

Thus philosophical opinions that were attributed to him in various writings that he left only in draft versions should be read with caution, because they were published posthumously by partisan proponents of Jansenism rather than their original author.

This may also testify to the extreme ill-health and loneliness he experienced in his final years, when he reported that he could find consolation for his misery only in religion.

Pascal was never employed in any capacity, and he lived modestly with the financial support provided by his family. His younger sister, Jacqueline, had predeceased him at the Port-Royal convent in October Pascal's philosophical reflections are dominated by a theological interpretation of the human condition that he claimed to have borrowed from Saint Augustine. On this view, Adam's fall from grace resulted in a human nature that is essentially corrupt, and there is no possibility of recovery by natural means or human effort.

This theological perspective determined Pascal's views about human freedom, and about ethics and politics; it also set extra-philosophical limits to his theory of knowledge, and prompted the negative assessment that he adopted, during the final years of his life, of the value of scientific or mathematical research.

Following Augustine, Pascal emphasized the extent to which any recovery from the fallen state of human nature was a gift from God, which could not be earned or deserved in any way by human agents. This divine gift included, as one of its elements, religious faith itself, that is, the capacity of humans to believe the theological interpretation on which the implied worldview depended. Other philosophical commentators on Christian belief in the seventeenth century, such as John Locke or John Toland, argued that what a Christian is invited to believe must be intelligible; according to them, there were no mysteries in Christianity if that term includes propositions that we cannot understand.

Thus religious faith merely compensated for a lack of evidence in support of a particular proposition, and made it possible for a Christian to accept it as true Clarke, For Pascal, however, faith provides appropriately disposed Christians with a means to transcend the limits of what is intelligible and to accept as true even matters that they cannot understand.

To claim otherwise would be to set limits to the reality of God and to reduce religious faith to the compass of human understanding. Thus those who are given the gift of genuine religious faith are expected not only to accept things that are uncertain but, especially, to accede to realities that are incomprehensible.

Pascal offered no explanation of how this was possible. This degree of incomprehensibility in the content of religious belief is consistent with a corresponding relativism about the competing claims of different religious traditions.

For example, each religion or each Christian sect might be understood as an alternative and equally uncertain perspective on the transcendent. His abdomen became distended and swollen, and the slightest annoyance triggered fits of crying and screaming.

This affliction supposedly continued for more than a year, and the child often seemed on the verge of death. The woman reportedly fell to the floor and promised to divulge everything if her life would be spared. She confessed that in a moment of anger and resentment she had cast a spell on the child — a fatal spell that could be undone only by having it transferred to some other living creature.

Supposedly the family cat was given to her and made a scapegoat for the otherwise doomed child. But that Pascal endured a serious and potentially fatal childhood illness during which his parents desperately tried all kinds of fanciful cures and treatments seems very likely.

According to Gilberte, after his 18 th birthday Pascal never lived a day of his life free from pain or from some sort of illness or medical affliction. The most common medical opinion is that he contracted gastrointestinal tuberculosis in early childhood and that manifestations of the disease, along with signs of possible concurrent nephritis or rheumatoid arthritis, recurred periodically throughout his lifetime. The accounts of his pathology are also consistent with migraine, irritable bowel syndrome, and fibromyalgia — a complex of illnesses often found together and which also frequently occur in combination with symptoms of anxiety, depression, and emotional distress.

Scholarly interest in this matter involves more than just idle curiosity and medical detective-work. Affliction and disease, physical or emotional trauma, a natural disadvantage or disability have often served as an added motive or accelerator for high-level creative achievement. Examples abound — from the ancient legend of the blind and vagabond Homer to the documented histories of modern creative figures like Isaac Newton, Van Gogh, Stephen Hawking, and Christy Brown.

Young Pascal was taught Latin and Greek as well as history, geography, and philosophy — all on an impromptu schedule, including during meals and at various hours throughout the day. Civil and canon law were also part of a varied curriculum that included study of the Bible and the Church Fathers. He taught his son his own cardinal principle that whatever is a matter of faith should not also be treated as a matter of reason; and vice-versa.

It is a tenet that Pascal took to heart and followed throughout his career. A passionate student who delved earnestly into each new subject, he absorbed new material, including, at a later period, the most arcane and technical components of theology quickly and effortlessly.

However, his learning, while deep in a few areas, was never broad and was in some ways less remarkable for what it included than for what it left out.

In addition, because of the sequestered, hermetic, entirely private form of his schooling, he never experienced any of the personal contacts or opportunities for social development that most young people, including even novice monks in monastic schools, commonly do. To what extent this may have deformed or limited his social and interpersonal skills it is hard to say.

He was known to be temperamentally impatient with and demanding of others while sometimes seeming arrogant and self-absorbed. At a later point in his career, he fully acknowledged his deficiencies and indeed chastised himself for his social ambition and intellectual vanity.

Pascal was not widely read in the classics or in contemporary literature. Though he was well acquainted with Aristotelian and Scholastic thought, philosophy for him consisted mainly of Epictetus, Montaigne, and the traditional debate between Stoicism and Epicureanism.

But whatever he may have lacked in physical education, humanistic studies, and art appreciation, Pascal more than made up for in his favored pursuits. Mersenne corresponded with Descartes, Huygens, Hobbes, and other luminaries of the period and actively promoted the work of controversial thinkers like Galileo and Gassendi. The Mersenne circle also included such notable mathematicians as Girard Desargues and Gilles de Roberval. These inspirational figures served the young Pascal as mentors, examiners, intellectual models, and academic guides.

It was during his involvement with the Mersenne circle that Pascal published, at age sixteen, his Essai pour les Coniques , an important contribution to the relatively new field of projective geometry.

Threatened with prison, he sought refuge in Auvergne. Rouen was a city in crisis, beset by street violence, crop failures, a tax revolt, and an outbreak of plague. Pascal meanwhile seems to have been little affected by the change of scene and continued with his mathematical studies. He also undertook a new project. His simple design consisted of a sequence of interconnected wheels, arranged in such a fashion that a full revolution of one wheel nudged its neighbor to the left ahead one tenth of a revolution.

Over the next five years he continued tinkering with his design, experimenting with various materials and trying out different linkage arrangements and gear mechanisms. Nine working models survive today and serve as a reminder that Pascal was not just a mathematical Platonist absorbed in a higher world of pure number but also a practical minded, down-to-earth engineering type interested in applying the insights of science and mathematics to the solution of real-world problems.

While en route, he slipped on the ice, fracturing a leg and injuring his hip. The Jansenists named for the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen accepted the strict Augustinian creed that salvation is achieved not by human virtue or merit but solely by the grace of God.

At Port-Royal they practiced an ascetic lifestyle emphasizing penance, austerity, devotional exercises, and good works. Pascal himself, along with his father and sisters, had never displayed much in the way of genuine religious fervor. They were good upper-middle-class Catholics, mild and respectful in their beliefs rather than zealous, neither God-fearing nor, to any extraordinary degree, God-seeking. Yet the ardor of the Deschamps brothers proved contagious. Gradually, with growing assurance, and eventually with complete sincerity and conviction, Pascal embraced the Jansenist creed.

She also asserts that at this time Pascal formally renounced all his scientific and mathematical researches and ever afterward devoted himself entirely and exclusively to the love and service of God. In the spring of , partly on the advice of his physicians, he returned to Paris where he linked up once again with former colleagues and began organizing several new essays and treatises for publication.

His supposed renunciation of natural philosophy and the bright world of Parisian intellectual life had lasted all of six months. It was not a period of debauchery and libertinism or anything of the kind. He was simply a young man who sought the company of fellow experts, savored the spotlight of recognition for personal achievement, and delighted in the social world of learned conversation and sparkling intellectual debate.

Shortly after his return to Paris in and during a turn for the worse in his health, Pascal reunited with his old circle of friends and fellow intellectuals and was also introduced into polite society. Descartes himself paid a visit and according to reports wisely suggested that Pascal follow a regimen of bed-rest and bouillon rather than the steady diet of enemas, purgings, and blood-lettings favored by his doctors.

The historic meeting between the two scientific and philosophical rivals reportedly did not go well. To escape the mob havoc and pervasive military presence in Paris, Pascal returned to Clermont along with his sisters, brother-in-law, and father.

He returned to Paris in , reconnected with his old friends, and began revising and polishing several scientific papers, including portions of a never completed or partially lost version of his Treatise on the Vacuum.

Pascal and Jacqueline were at his bedside. However, the letter includes a note of affection for the man who had taken personal charge of his education and who was the first to introduce him to the world of science and mathematics.

Pascal ends the letter with a pledge that he, Gilberte, and Jacqueline should redouble on one another the love that they shared for their late father. In the summer of Pascal exchanged a series of letters with Fermat on the problem of calculating gambling odds and probabilities. It was also at this time although many have doubted his authorship that he completed his Discourse on Love. According to various sources, none wholly reliable, in October of , Pascal was supposedly involved in a nearly fatal accident while crossing the Pont de Neuilly in his coach.

His affrighted horses reportedly reared, bolted, and plunged over the side of the bridge into the Seine, nearly dragging the coach and Pascal after them. Fortunately, the main coupling broke and the coach, with Pascal inside, miraculously hung on to the edge and stabilized. Sigmund Freud accepted the story and even used it as an example of how severe trauma can trigger an obsessive or phobic reaction. However, there is no conclusive evidence that the event ever happened.

This dual record, known as the Memorial, he kept sewed into the lining of his jacket as a kind of secret token or private testament of his new life and total commitment to Jesus Christ. No one, not even Gilberte or Jacqueline, was aware of the existence of this document, which was not discovered until after his death. The text of the Memorial is cryptic, ejaculatory, portentous. At the top of the sheet stands a cross followed by a few lines establishing the time and date, then the word FEU fire in all upper case and centered near the top of the page.

Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. My God and your God. Thy God will be my God. And so on, in a similarly ecstatic vein for about eighteen more lines.

I shall not forget thy word. His account, despite its brevity and gnomic style, accords closely with the reports of conversion and mysticism classically described and analyzed by William James. In the weeks leading up to November 23, , Pascal had on several occasions visited Jacqueline at Port-Royal and had complained, despite his active social life and ongoing scientific work, of feelings of dissatisfaction, guilt, lack of purpose, and ennui.

As in the story of his carriage accident by the Seine, he seemed to be a man teetering on the edge — in this case between anxiety and hope. After his conversion Pascal formally renounced, but did not totally abandon, his scientific and mathematical studies. He instead vowed to dedicate his time and talents to the glorification of God, the edification of his fellow believers, and the salvation of the larger human community.

In fact, hardly had Pascal committed himself to Port-Royal than the Jansenist enclave, never secure and always under the watchful suspicion of the greater Catholic community, found itself under theological siege.

Antoine Arnauld, the spiritual leader of Port-Royal and the uncompromising voice and authority for its strict Augustinian beliefs and values, was embroiled in a bitter controversy pitting Jansenism against the Pope, the Jesuit order, and a majority of the bishops of France.

In effect, opponents charged that the entire Jansenist system was based on a foundation of error. At issue were matters of Catholic doctrine involving grace, election, human righteousness, divine power, and free will. Arnauld denied the charges and published a series of vehement counter-attacks.

Unfortunately, these only served to make the hostility towards himself and the Port-Royal community more intense. He ended up being censored by the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne and stood threatened with official accusations of heresy. With the official voice of Port-Royal effectively muted, the cause of Jansenism needed a new champion.

Pascal stood ready to fill the role. During the period , under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte,. The Lettres provinciales , as they became known, introduced an entirely new tone and style into contemporary theological debate. From time to time, the genre had served as a forum for obfuscation, vituperation, abstruse technical language, and stodgy academic prose.

They also featured a popular idiom and conversational tone and made use of literary devices such as characterization, dialog, dramatization, and narrative voice. They became a sensation and attracted the amused attention of readers throughout France. Who, people wondered, is this clever fellow Montalte? The Jesuits, stunned and slow to respond, seemed to have met their intellectual match.

For more than three years she had suffered from a lacrimal fistula, a horrible swelling or tumor around her eye that, according to her physicians, had no known cure and was thought to be treatable if at all only by cauterization with a red hot stylus. The seeming miracle excited the Pascal family and the entire Port-Royal community; news of the event soon spread outside the walls of Port-Royal and around the nation.

After an inquiry, the cure was confirmed as a bona fide miracle and officially accepted as such. Port-Royal rejoiced, and for a while the antagonism against it from the larger Catholic community abated. Pascal regarded the miracle as a sign of divine favor for his Lettres project and for the cause of Jansenism in general. Despite the auspicious sign of heavenly favor, and even though the Lettres were brilliantly successful in the short term, they failed in their ultimate goal of vindicating Arnauld and Port-Royal.

In the monastery was no longer allowed to accept novices. Early in the next century the abbey would be abolished, the community of worshippers disbanded, and the buildings razed.

Overwhelmed by a combined force of royal politics and papal power, Port-Royal would lie in ruins and Jansenism, though it would inspire a few random offshoots and latter-day imitations, would find itself largely reduced to an interesting but brief chapter in the history of French Catholicism.

She also claims that the solution to the problem, which had challenged the likes of Galileo, Torricelli, and Descartes, came to him almost despite himself and during a bout of sleeplessness caused by a toothache. What is known is that when Pascal, under the pseudonym Amos Dettonville, actually did publish his solution, which was done within the context of a contest or challenge that he had thrown out to some of the best mathematical minds of Europe, the result was a controversy that occupied his time and energy for several months and which distracted him from working on his new project.

By early he was already seriously ill and could work for only short spurts before succumbing to mental and physical exhaustion. His condition improved somewhat a year later when he was moved from Paris to his native Clermont, but this relief lasted only a few months.

When he returned to Paris he mustered enough energy to work out his plan for a public shuttle system of omnibuses for the city. When this novel idea was realized and put into actual operation in , Paris had the first such transit system in the world. According to Gilberte, he regarded any sort of dining pleasure or gastronomic delight as a hateful form of sensuality and adopted the very un-Gallic view that one should eat strictly for nourishment and not for enjoyment. He championed the ideal of poverty and claimed that one should prefer and use goods crafted by the poorest and most honest artisans, not those manufactured by the best and most accomplished.

He purged his home of luxuries and pretty furnishings and took in a homeless family. He even cautioned Gilberte not to be publicly affectionate with her children — on grounds that caresses can be a form of sensuality, dependency, and self-indulgence. In his opinion, a life devoted to God did not allow for close personal attachments — not even to family. During his last days he burned with fever and colic. His doctors assaulted him with their customary cures. He wavered in and out of consciousness and suffered a series of recurrent violent convulsions.

However, Gilberte attests that he recovered his clarity of mind in time to make a final confession, take the Blessed Sacrament, and receive extreme unction. Even post-mortem Pascal was unable to escape the curiosity and intrusiveness of his physicians. Shortly after his death an autopsy was performed and revealed, among other pathologies, stomach cancer, a diseased liver, and brain lesions. Nor after death, was he granted peace from the still ongoing crossfire between Jesuits and Port-Royal.

Was Pascal, it was asked, truly orthodox and a good Catholic? A sincere believer and supporter of the powers of the Pope and the priesthood and the efficacious intervention of the Saints? Did he reject the Jansenist heresy on his deathbed and accept a more moderate and forgiving theology? His works have fared better, having received, during the three and a half centuries since his death, first-rate editorial attention, a number of superb translations, and an abundance of expert scholarly commentary.

Their aim was to defend the Jansenist community of Port-Royal and its principal spokesman and spiritual leader Antoine Arnauld from defamation and accusations of heresy while at the same time leading a counter-offensive against the accusers mainly the Jesuits. Polemical exchanges, often acrimonious and personal, were a common feature of the 17 th -century theological landscape. Pascal ventured into this particular fray with a unique set of weapons — a mind honed by mathematical exercise and scientific debate, a pointed wit, and sharp-edged literary and dramatic skills.

Even the just, no matter how hard they may strive, lack the power and grace to keep all the commandments. In our fallen condition it is impossible for us to resist interior grace. In order to deserve merit or condemnation we must be free from external compulsion though not from internal necessity. Two separate questions were at stake: 1 Are the propositions actually in Jansen, if not explicitly and verbatim , then implicitly in meaning or intention?

This was the so-called question of fact de fait. This was the question of right or law de droit. The Port-Royal position was yes in the case of the second question, no in the case of the first.

Despite the fact that he disavowed any support for the five propositions, he and the Port-Royal community as a whole stood under suspicion of secretly approving, if not openly embracing them. Such was the situation that Pascal found himself in when he sat down to compose the first provinciale. What he produced was something utterly new in the annals of religious controversy.

In place of the usual fury and technical quibbling, he adopts a tone of easy-going candor and colloquial simplicity. Through devices of interview and dialogue Montalte manages to present these issues in relatively clear, understandable terms and persuade the reader that the Jansenist and Thomist views on each are virtually identical and perfectly orthodox.

He goes on to show that any apparent discrepancy between the two positions — and in fact the whole attack on Jansenism and Arnauld — is based not on doctrine, but is entirely political and personal, a product of Jesuit calumny and conspiracy.

In effect, a complicated theological conflict is presented in the form of a simple human drama. Irony and stinging satire are delivered with the suave aplomb of a Horatian epistle. References show. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Blaise Pascal, l'homme et l'oeuvre, Proc. Pascal at Royaumont, France P Humbert, L'oeuvre scientific de Pascal Paris, Schickard , Pascal , Leibniz Paris, A J Krailsheimer, Pascal E Mortimer, Blaise Pascal : the life and work of a realist London, S Chapman, Blaise Pascal - : Tercentenary of the calculating machine, Nature , - F A Chimenti, Pascal's wager : a decision-theoretic approach, Math.

Histoire Sci. Torino Cl. II, Historia Sci. K Hara, Pascal et Wallis au sujet de la cycloide, Ann. Japan Assoc. D L Hilliker, A study in the history of analysis up to the time of Leibniz and Newton in regard to Newton's discovery of the binomial theorem. Contributions of Pascal, Math. Student 40 , 28 - J Mesnard, Sluse et Pascal, Bull. O Ore, Pascal and the invention of probability theory, Amer. Monthly 67 , - D Van Dantzig, Blaise Pascal and the significance of the mathematical way of thought for the study of human society Dutch , Euclides, Groningen 25 , - V Vita, Il teorema sull'esagono nell' 'Essay pour les coniques' di Pascal, Archimede 26 5 - 6 , - Additional Resources show.

Other scholars think that he did not attend the meetings until he was about sixteen. Whichever was the case, he was far younger than the adults who were there. In the Pascal family moved to Rouen, France. Blaise was still taught mainly by his father. He worked very hard, but was frequently in poor health. During this time he developed a new theorem, or mathematical formula that can be proven, in geometry. He sometimes referred to this theorem as a "mystic hexagram. It was the foundation for an important, and, at the time, almost entirely undeveloped branch of mathematics.

In , at age sixteen, Pascal wrote a book, Essay on Conics. It deals with the geometry of cones. He gave the mystic hexagram central importance in this book. At the age of nineteen, Pascal invented a calculating machine.

It was able to add and subtract by having a person move a series of gears and cylinders. This was an early form of a computer. In Pascal's father had an accident and was confined to his house. Some neighbors who were Jansenists came to visit him. The Jansenists were a religious group formed by Cornelius Jansen — Their beliefs were very different from the teachings of the Jesuits, who were the most influential group at the time.

The Pascals began adopting the Jansenist beliefs. As a result, they received opposition from the local Jesuits. Pascal continued to enjoy a more worldly life. He had a number of aristocratic upper-class and famous friends and money from his patrimony inheritance to support himself.

In , however, he completely converted to Jansenism, and joined his sister at the convent at Port Royal. In the writer Antoine Arnauld — was formally condemned for heretical teaching, a teaching that opposed the standard beliefs of the church.