Pensées

De la Blaise Pascal cititorii au reținut cîteva formule potrivite pentru conversațiile subțiri. Cea mai cunoscută dintre ele e, desigur, aceea în care omul e comparat cu o trestie firavă, pentru a-i sublinia (a cîta oară?) fragilitatea. Înțelepciunea populară a produs și alți termeni de comparație:......more

[URL not allowed] Perhaps half of this was basically wasted on me. As an atheist, books providing proofs for the existence of God are perhaps 40 years or so too late. The problem here isn’t so much that he is trying to prove the existence of an entity that he himself admits par......more

Religious Thoughts of a Mathematician 29 August 2016 - Paris, France When I was learning French I was rather thrown by the way their numbers work after about 60, as is demonstrated by this picture, which shows how English, German, and French construct the number 98: My first thought was 'this is abso......more

Pascal seems to have been born for greatness. At a young age he displayed an intense talent for mathematics, apparently deducing a few propositions of Euclid by himself; and he matured into one of the great mathematical minds of Europe, making fundamental contributions to the science of probability.......more

On the human nature: 'What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.' 'This twofold nature of man is so evident that some......more