User:ScatheMote/Blaise Pascal

>The following is excerpted from pages xi-xiv of Blaise Pascal’s Secret Letters .

Preface
It was generally considered, by scholarship as a whole, that Blaise Pascal, the famous French mathematician, philosopher, debonair, and religious apologist, died at the age of 39, after losing the battle to poor health. Recently, however, mostly due to the recent excavation of Xanadu, the ancient capital of the Yuan Empire, many new findings have come to light, including a cache of letters attributed to Blaise Pascal, written after his death, which shocked the academic world and Pascal scholars in particular. The authorship and date of these letters were eventually independently verified by six different sources; it cannot be argued that these letters were not written by Pascal after his supposed death. . The letters, translated and edited for the first time in this volume, represent a triumph of historiography, archaeology, anthropology and teleology.

Who was Blaise Pascal?
For those not in the know, who are few and far between, numbering only those who are illiterate, idiotic, or lie on a spectrum in between, Blaise Pascal was a child prodigy, progeny of nobodies, who inventions of Pascal’s Triangle, the first calculator, probability, and concepts of vacuums and pressure represented enormous steps forward for mankind. Pascal came into favor in the court of Louis VIII, who patronized many of his most famous experiments, despite never coming to understand them. The ascension of the next king, Louis XI, led to problems for Pascal. Louis XI notoriously hated mathematics and computation. Famously, on his ascension, he stated: “Les Mathématiques, c’est la poubelle.” This boded poorly the most famous and prolific mathematician of the French court. Pascal, fearing for his own life, left the court and retired to countryside of Rouen, where his childhood home was located. There, almost all scholars assumed he died of poor health.

The discovery of the letters has changed all previous assumptions. In them, most of which were addressed to the Emperor of China, Kublai Khan, Pascal admits that he faked his own death and fled East for fame and fortune among the Mongol court. There, Pascal, bored of the poverty of farm life, attempted to reclaim his former fortunes by joining a merchant caravan, commission explicitly by the Great Khan.

The letters that follow detail the course of Pascal’s failures and follies, successes and succors.