They named a computer language after this guy

With game show news slowed to a crawl in the dog days, I'm really going to stretch with this entry. All the way back to the 17th century, in fact.

No, I'm not going to discuss some Renaissance versions of Pat and Vanna who trooped around the countryside with a big wheel. Instead, I'm going to talk about the gentleman in the picture, Blaise Pascal. This guy was an undoubted genius. With fellow French mathematician Pierre Fermat (he of the famous and now-proved Last Theorem) Pascal laid the foundations of modern-day probability and statistics.

His work underlays much of today's science, engineering and finance, not to mention the entire economy of Las Vegas, NV. And it also impacts our little world of chance-based game shows. Unfortunately, the undoubted genius Blaise Pascal happened to be a nutcase religious fanatic. He got his jollies from a sincere belief that almost all of us are predestined to eternal hellfire.

For obscure reasons I'm currently plodding through Pascal's Provincial Letters. This innocently titled book is a screaming polemic on religion that shows Pascal at his vindictive, puritanical worst. It's studded with charming passages like these:

Do we not find God at once hates and despises sinners; so that even at the hour of death, when their condition is most sad and deplorable, Divine Wisdom adds mockery to the vengeance which consigns them to eternal punishment? "I will laugh at your calamity." The saints, too, influenced by the same feeling, will join in the derision; for, according to David, when they witness the punishment of the wicked, "they shall fear, and yet laugh at it."

This guy makes John Calvin look easygoing and chummy. Oh well, Pascal has long since gone on to...whatever he went on to. We can still benefit from his mathematical and scientific work, even if we're hopeless sinners predestined to not-so-lovely parting gifts.