Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, theologian, and writer. His father, Étienne Pascal, was an amateur mathematician and a highly erudite lawyer who served as a counselor to the royal court. It was within his family, where he was raised in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne's pedagogical ideas, that Pascal received his initial knowledge of mathematics and philosophy. He advanced in these sciences so rapidly that he earned a reputation as a child prodigy. Even as a teenager, he developed numerous ideas that became classics in mathematics and physics. At the age of 17, he invented an original calculating machine, which he later refined and for which he received a royal patent in 1649 under the name "Pascal's Calculator" (Pascaline).
The year 1646 was a turning point for Pascal's worldview. During this year, his father fell gravely ill, and Blaise was cared for by two scholarly monks—followers of the reformist ideas of Saint-Cyran, the abbot of the Port-Royal monastery. Saint-Cyran preached the doctrines of Cornelius Jansen, which held that only Divine Grace could save a human being, provided they themselves reached for it. Before long, Pascal embraced the ideas of Jansenism, becoming one of their devout followers and advocates.
Gradually, Pascal grew closer to the Jansenist circle and the community associated with Port-Royal, taking a decisive stance in the religious debates of the era. He spent his final years in this very abbey. Severely ill—suffering from migraines, chronic dental problems, and kidney failure—at the end of his life he devoted himself entirely to Christianity and wrote the famous Pensées (notes he kept for a future, ultimately unwritten work, Apology for the Christian Religion).
