Blaise Pascal's Night of Fire

On the evening of November 23, 1654, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal sat alone in his Paris rooms. He was thirty-one years old, brilliant beyond measure, and spiritually restless. For months he had drifted between the certainties of geometry and a gnawing hunger that no equation could satisfy. Something had been calling to him — through his sister Jacqueline's quiet faith, through the Jansenist writings he'd been reading late at night — but he hadn't yet named it.…