Mathematicians throughout History. The life of Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and philosopher. He is considered one of the greatest minds in Western intellectual history.
Pascal demonstrated his abilities at a very early age. He was educated by his father, who decided that Blaise should not study mathematics before the age of 15 and all mathematics texts were removed from their house. Blaise however demonstrated immense interest towards it, starting to work on geometry himself at the age of 12 and proving himself a mathematical prodigy. He discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle are two right angles and, when his father found out, he gave in and allowed Blaise a copy of Euclid.
At the age of sixteen, Pascal wrote his first essay that contained a number of projective geometry theorems, including Pascal's famous theorem about his mystic hexagon (if an arbitrary hexagon is inscribed in any conic section, and pairs of opposite sides are extended until they meet, the three intersection points will lie on a straight line, the Pascal line of that configuration.)
Pascal was the inventor of the first mechanical calculator, a machine, very similar to mechanical calculator of the 1940s. In 1642-1645 he worked on it, in order to help his father with his work collecting taxes.
During the last years of his life Pascal abandoned his scientific work and devoted himself to Catholic philosophy and theology. He began to publish anonymous works on religious topics, eighteen Provincial Letters (published in1656 -1657). As scholars note, he treated the mysterious relations of human beings with God as if they were a geometrical problem.
Pascal's most famous work in philosophy is Pensées, a collection of personal thoughts on human suffering and faith in God (1656-1658). This work contains “Pascal's wager” which claims to prove that belief in God is rational with the following argument: “If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.”
Pascal spent his last years helping the poor people and attending one religious service after another. Hel died at the age of 39. Controversy seemed to follow Pascal throughout his life. For example, Pascal offered a prize for a mathematical contest he proposed. However, he entered the answer under a pseudonym and crowned himself the winner.