Blaise Pascal invented a calculating machine at nineteen, co-founded probability theory, and then turned his back on mathematics for God — leaving behind the Pensées, the most haunting fragments in French literature. John Tulloch’s Pascal follows that double life with Victorian thoroughness: the prodigy of Clermont, the experiments on the vacuum, Port-Royal, and the long argument with Jesuit casuistry that produced the Provincial Letters.
Tulloch, a Scottish divine, is particularly good on the religious crisis at the centre of Pascal’s story, treating it as neither embarrassment nor triumph but as the key to the man. Download the free EPUB for a sympathetic life of the mind that burned twice as bright in half the time.