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Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. [1] This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God .
Blaise Pascal [a] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen.
Pascal's law (also Pascal's principle [1] [2] [3] or the principle of transmission of fluid-pressure) is a principle in fluid mechanics given by Blaise Pascal that states that a pressure change at any point in a confined incompressible fluid is transmitted throughout the fluid such that the same change occurs everywhere. [4]
The problem of points, also called the problem of division of the stakes, is a classical problem in probability theory.One of the famous problems that motivated the beginnings of modern probability theory in the 17th century, it led Blaise Pascal to the first explicit reasoning about what today is known as an expected value.
The great thinker’s turn toward the theological has lessons for us even today.
Pascal's theorem is the polar reciprocal and projective dual of Brianchon's theorem. It was formulated by Blaise Pascal in a note written in 1639 when he was 16 years old and published the following year as a broadside titled "Essay pour les coniques. Par B. P." [1] Pascal's theorem is a special case of the Cayley–Bacharach theorem.
Second edition of Blaise Pascal's Pensées, 1670. The Pensées (Thoughts) is a collection of fragments written by the French 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Pascal's religious conversion led him into a life of asceticism, and the Pensées was in many ways his life's work. [1]
The earliest known mention of the gambler's ruin problem is a letter from Blaise Pascal to Pierre Fermat in 1656 (two years after the more famous correspondence on the problem of points). [2] Pascal's version was summarized in a 1656 letter from Pierre de Carcavi to Huygens: