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that question. He did not carry his work on randomness beyond that problem of dice and said in the first paragraph of his work that he was writing about dice only because he had been “ordered” to do so.5 In 1633, as his reward for promoting a new approach to science, Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition. But science and theology had parted ways for good; scientists now analyzing how? were unburdened by the theologians’ issue of why? Soon a scholar from a new generation, schooled since his youth on Galileo’s philosophy of science, would take the analysis of contingency counting to new heights, reaching a level of understanding without which most of today’s science could not be conducted.

WITH THE BLOSSOMING of the scientific revolution the frontiers of randomness moved from Italy to France, where a new breed of scientist, rebelling against Aristotle and following Galileo, developed it further and deeper than had either Cardano or Galileo. This time the importance of the new work would be recognized, and it would make waves all over Europe. Though the new ideas would again be developed in the context of gambling, the first of this new breed was more a mathematician turned gambler than, like Cardano, a gambler turned mathematician. His name was Blaise Pascal.

Pascal was born in June 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, a little more than 250 miles south of Paris. Realizing his son’s brilliance, and having moved to Paris, Blaise’s father introduced him at age thirteen to a newly founded discussion group there that insiders called the Académie Mersenne after the black-robed friar who had founded it. Mersenne’s society included the famed philosopher-mathematician René Descartes and the amateur mathematics genius Pierre de Fermat. The strange mix of brilliant thinkers and large egos, with Mersenne present to stir the pot, must have had a great influence on the teenage Blaise, who developed personal ties to both Fermat and Descartes and picked up a deep grounding in the new scientific method. “Let all the disciples of Aristotle…,” he would write, “recognize that experiment is the true master who must be followed in Physics.”6

But how did a bookish and stodgy fellow of pious beliefs become involved with issues of the urban gambling scene? On and off Pascal experienced stomach pains, had difficulty swallowing and keeping food down, and suffered from debilitating weakness, severe headaches, bouts of sweating, and partial paralysis of the legs. He stoically followed the advice of his physicians, which involved bleedings, purgings, and the consumption of asses’ milk and other “disgusting” potions that he could barely keep from vomiting—a “veritable torture,” according to his sister Gilberte.7 Pascal had by then left Paris, but in the summer of 1647, aged twenty-four and growing desperate, he moved back with his sister Jacqueline in search of better medical care. There his new bevy of doctors offered the state-of-the-art advice that Pascal “ought to give up all continued mental labor, and should seek as much as possible all opportunities to divert himself.”8 And so Pascal taught himself to kick back and relax and began to spend time in the company of other young men of leisure. Then, in 1651, Blaise’s father died, and suddenly Pascal was a twenty-something with an inheritance. He put the cash to good use, at least in the sense of his doctors’ orders. Biographers call the years from 1651 to 1654 Pascal’s “worldly period.” His sister Gilberte called it “the time of his life that was worst employed.”9 Though he put some effort into self-promotion, his scientific research went almost nowhere, but for the record, his health was the best it had ever been.

Often in history the study of the random has been aided by an event that was itself random. Pascal’s work represents such an occasion, for it was his abandonment of study that led him to the study of chance. It all began when one of his partying pals introduced him to a forty-five-year-old snob named Antoine Gombaud. Gombaud, a nobleman whose title was chevalier de Méré, regarded himself as