Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and theologian, as well as a writer whose brilliant command of the language marked him as a master of French prose. His early, anonymous masterpiece Les Lettres Provinciales became the model for Voltaire's polemics. Pascal's Pensées, his last great work, remained unfinished at the time of his death at age thirty-nine.