5/ Pascal was also a prolific writer on philosophy & theology; his 'Pensées' is considered a masterpiece of French prose. Nevertheless, he famously concluded that “The more I see of men, the better I like my dog”.
2/ His doctor wanted Pascal to get out of the house more as he tended to go to extremes in both his nerdy work & religious practices, which had a bad effect on his already fragile health (he was to die at 39). Gambling resulted in his work on probability & his invention of the roulette wheel.
2/ Fun fact: Ronald Fisher who could never bear criticism quit the Cambridge Philosophical Society altogether when Bartlett published a paper in the Proceedings correcting some of Fisher’s ANCOVA errors.
#OTD 1895 Charles P Winsor b (d 4 Apr 1951) ASA Fellow 1949. Developer of 'winsorization', the clipping of outliers by setting them to prespecified percentiles of the data. He also did important work on small samples, Gompertz growth curves & linear regression with error in both variables