After Blaise Pascal died, a note was found sewn into the lining of his coat, a record of a two-hour encounter with the divine that he had re-stitched into every garment for eight years. This episode follows a mind that swung like a pendulum between rigorous mathematics and agonizing faith: the boy who reconstructed Euclid's propositions in charcoal on the floor after his father banned math, the teenager who built the Pascaline mechanical calculator in 1642 to help his exhausted tax-collector father, and the young scientist who sent his brother-in-law up the Puy de Dome with a mercury barometer to prove air has weight and vacuums exist.

We cover his 1654 correspondence with Fermat that invented probability theory and expected value, Pascal's triangle, the family crises and Jansenist influence that preceded his night of fire in November 1654, ...