The latter contains Pascal's wager, known in the original as the Discourse on the Machine, a fideistic probabilistic argument for God's existence. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits.

Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology.

In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. Following Torricelli and Galileo Galilei, he rebutted the likes of Aristotle and Descartes who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum in 1647. He made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal wrote in defense of the scientific method and produced several controversial results. Like his contemporary René Descartes, Pascal was also a pioneer in the natural and applied sciences. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines), establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator. He later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. His earliest mathematical work was on conic sections he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Blaise Pascal ( / p æ ˈ s k æ l/ pass- KAL, also UK: /- ˈ s k ɑː l, ˈ p æ s k əl, - s k æ l/ -⁠ KAHL, PASS-kəl, -⁠kal, US: / p ɑː ˈ s k ɑː l/ pahs- KAHL French: 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.

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