Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician and scientist. He was a genius (as a child, he discovered all the theorems of Euclid before he’d ever even heard of Euclid!), and some of his mathematical theorems are still studied today. Then when he was thirty-one, something life-altering happened to him. And we know this because eight years later, when he died an untimely death, a worn parchment was found sown into his coat. Written on it was the following testimony: The year of Grace 1654. Monday, 23 November From about half past ten in the evening until about half past
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