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Blaise Pascal: 3 ideas and puzzles worth knowing

3 ideas and puzzles from Blaise Pascal, each explained in a minute and credited to the original work. Free on Savvy.

• Betting on God is the only wager where losing costs you nothing

  Blaise Pascal argued that since reason can't settle whether God exists, treat belief as a bet: wager on God's existence and you risk very little if you're wrong, but gain everythin…

  — Blaise Pascal, Pensées

• A gambler's losing streak accidentally invented the mathematics of probability

  In the 1650s, French gambler Chevalier de Méré bet on rolling at least one 6 in four rolls of a die (which he consistently won) and on rolling double-6 in twenty-four rolls of two …

  — Blaise Pascal, Correspondence with Pierre de Fermat

• The Interrupted Game's Fair Split

  Two people wager equal stakes on a fair coin-flip game, first to 6 points wins the whole pot. They're forced to quit early, with the score at 5 to 3. Splitting the pot 5:3 (by poin…

  — Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat, Correspondence of 1654 (on the Problem of Points, first posed in Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, 1494)

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