Birthday of Blaise Pascal (1623)

Blaise Pascal was a prodigy who wrote a treatise on conic sections at 16 that Descartes refused to believe was written by a child. He invented a mechanical calculator at 18, founded probability theory with Fermat through letters on gambling, and applied probability to theology in Pascal's Wager. His triangle contains the binomial coefficients, Fibonacci numbers, Sierpiński triangle, and powers of 11. Pascal also discovered the fundamental theorem of projective geometry, made contributions to fluid mechanics, and invented the syringe. He died at 39, having packed several mathematical lifetimes into one.