Sublime

The idea of building knowledge from first principles has a long tradition in philosophy. In the Western canon it goes back to Plato and Socrates, with significant contributions from Aristotle and Descartes. Essentially, they were looking for the foundational knowledge that would not change and that we could build everything else on, from our

without God, Pascal believed, we are capable of seeing the true good in anything at all, even in our own destruction.

The dividend of the computer revolution to us did not come in the flooding of self-perpetuating e-mail messages and access to chat rooms; it was in the sudden availability of fast processors capable of generating a million sample paths per minute.

Probability theory was invented to help rich aristocrats win more money with their gambling. Pascal’s theory was extremely successful,

Laplace continued his research throughout France’s political upheavals. In 1810 he announced the central limit theorem, one of the great scientific and statistical discoveries of all time. It asserts that, with some exceptions, any average of a large number of similar terms will have a normal, bell-shaped distribution.

Blaise Pascal famously wrote, ‘The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know’.

He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.