Pascal

Pascal invented a calculating machine as a teenager, helped found probability theory, and established the physics of the vacuum, then turned from science to the condition of the soul. His Pensees, fragments left at his early death, stare without flinching at human smallness against the silence of infinite space, and at the restlessness no distraction can cure. Faith, he held, is not the conclusion of an argument but a wager the whole person makes, and the heart has reasons reason cannot reach. He is the rare thinker equally at home with a theorem and with dread.