Pascal Mathematician Quotes

What Pascal overlooked was the hair-raising possibility that God might out-Luther Luther. A special area in hell might be reserved for those who go to mass. Or God might punish those whose faith is prompted by prudence. Perhaps God prefers the abstinent to those who whore around with some denomination he despises. Perhaps he reserves special rewards for those who deny themselves the comfort of belief. Perhaps the intellectual ascetic will win all while those who compromised their intellectual integrity lose everything. There are many other possibilities. There might be many gods, including one who favors people like Pascal; but the other gods might overpower or outvote him, à la Homer. Nietzsche might well have applied to Pascal his cutting remark about Kant: when he wagered on God, the great mathematician 'became an idiot.

Just as all things speak about God to those that know Him, and reveal Him to those that love Him, they also hide Him from all those that neither seek nor know Him.

Sceptic, mathematician, Christian; doubt, affirmation, submission.

Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician and physicist, wrote in Lettres Provinciales (translated), “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer. Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it.

Christopher’s anti-God campaign was based on a fundamental error reflected in the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything. On the contrary, since religion, as practiced, is a human activity, the reverse is true. Human beings poison religion, imposing their prejudices, superstitions, and corruptions onto its rituals and texts, not the other way around. “Pascal Is a Fraud!” When I first became acquainted with Christopher’s crusade, I immediately thought of the seventeenth-century scientist and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. In addition to major contributions to scientific knowledge, Pascal produced exquisite reflections on religious themes: When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here?4 These are the questions that only a religious faith can attempt to answer. There is no science of the why of our existence, no scientific counsel or solace for our human longings, loneliness, and fear. Without a God to make sense of our existence, Pascal wrote, human life is intolerable: This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there that revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied. . . .5 To resolve this dilemma, Pascal devised his famous “wager,” which, simply stated, is that since we cannot know whether there is a God or not, it is better to wager that there is one, rather than that there is not.

[THE DAILY BREATH] Blaise Pascal, the famous mathematician, once said: "To those who wish to see, God gives them sufficient light. To those who doesn't wish to see, God gives them sufficient darkness." Seeing the Truth is a choice. Listening to my words is a choice. Healing is a choice. If want scientific evidence about the existence of God, there is a wealth of data to support it. Dr. Jeffrey Long, M.D. used the best scientific techniques available today to study more than 4,000 people who had near-death experiences and found themselves face to face with our Heavenly Father. Read the book "God and the Afterlife" and you will find it. If you want scientific evidence about Jesus being the Son of God, Lee Strobel, an atheist investigative journalist discovered it. Read the book "The Case for Christ" and you will find it. If you want scientific evidence about Jesus still healing today, study the ministries of Dr. Charles Ndifon, T.L. Osborn, Kathryn Kuhlman among others, and you will find it. But most importantly, if you want to fill the emptiness within you, and experience the perfect love, mercy and forgiveness, if you want to live in the peace of our Heavenly Father, give your body, your mind and your heart to Christ. Give your life to Jesus. The empty place you feel in your heart is reserved only for the spirit of Christ and nothing from this world will fill it. Look up to heaven, behold Jesus and Live.

The breakthrough came in 1944 when John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician living in the United States, advanced the concept of a stored program. The idea was familiar to others in the field, but von Neumann saw its significance most clearly. With a stored program, the instructions for the computer could be kept in the machine’s own memory and treated in the same way as data. This would make it far quicker to launch a program and easier to modify it or switch from one program to another. As

In 1951, Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician with the U.S. Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance Naval Reserve, conceived of a program called a compiler, which translated a programmer’s instructions into the strings of ones and zeroes, or machine language, that ultimately controlled the computer. In principle, compilers seemed just the thing to free programmers from the tyranny of hardware and the mind-numbing binary code. Hopper

Blaise Pascal, Christian philosopher and mathematician wrote: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

The mystical approach to studying creativity suggests that creativity is the result of divine inspiration or is a spiritual process. In the history of mathematics, Blaise Pascal claimed that many of his mathematical insights came directly from God. The renowned 19th century algebraist Leopold Kronecker said that “God made the integers, all the rest is the work of man” (Gallian, 1994). Kronecker believed that all other numbers, being the work of man, were to be avoided; and although his radical beliefs did not attract many supporters, the intuitionists advocated his beliefs about constructive proofs many years after his death. There have been attempts to explore possible relationships between mathematicians’ beliefs about the nature of mathematics and their creativity (Davis and Hersh, 1981; Hadamard, 1945; Poincaré, 1948; Sriraman, 2004a). These studies indicate that such a relationship does exist. It is commonly believed that the neo-Platonist view is helpful to the research mathematician because of the innate belief that the sought after result/relationship already exists.

The future just isn’t the sort of thing you get to order around like that, as the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal understood: “So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours … We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.

So a surprisingly effective antidote to anxiety can be to simply realize that this demand for reassurance from the future is one that will definitely never be satisfied—no matter how much you plan or fret, or how much extra time you leave to get to the airport. You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one—which means you have permission to stop engaging in it. The future just isn’t the sort of thing you get to order around like that, as the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal understood: “So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours … We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.

How many of the great mathematicians have been perverts?” None, was his answer. “Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married. . . . The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal

When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid . . . I marvel that people are not seized with despair at such a miserable condition. — French mathematician/philosopher Blaise Pascal (born 1623)

The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is often credited for sending a long letter stating he simply didn’t have time to send a short one.

All experienced writers know the key to great writing isn’t in what they say; it’s in what they don’t say. The more we cut out, the better the screenplay or book. The mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is often credited for sending a long letter stating he simply didn’t have time to send a short one.

Most early scientists were compelled to study the natural world because of their Christian worldview. In Science and the Modern World, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead concludes that modern science developed primarily from “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.” Modern science did not develop in a vacuum, but from forces largely propelled by Christianity. Not surprisingly, most early scientists were theists, including pioneers such as Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Johannes Kepler (1571– 1630), Blaise Pascal (1623–62), Robert Boyle (1627–91), Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and Louis Pasteur (1822–95). For many of them, belief in God was the prime motivation for their investigation of the natural world. Bacon believed the natural world was full of mysteries God intended for us to explore. Kepler described his motivation for science: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God, and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote: “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

One of the most important of the gambler-mathematicians was the weirdo genius Blaise Pascal. As a teenager, he had written a treatise on geometry that was good enough to impress Descartes (who was in the midst of inventing a branch of modern geometry).

French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal understood: “So imprudent are we,” he wrote, “that we wander in the times which are not ours … We try to [give the present the support of] the future, and think of arranging matters which are not in our power, for a time which we have no certainty of reaching.