Yikes. I almost titled this "Blaise of Glory"

Blaise Pascal!

Now there was a name. Nobody names their kids "Blaise" anymore.

Really: Go to Blaise Pascal's Wikipedia entry, and at the bottom you'll see all the categories that Blaise Pascal belongs to. There are some obscure categories, like "1662 deaths" and "Jansenists" and "People from Auvergne" and "Christian people," but go to the most obscure one -- "People named 'Blaise'" -- and he'll be the only person listed.

These days people aren't given the name 'Blaise' but some do change their name to 'Blaise'. Of course, they spell it 'Blaze' and these people are strippers, not mathematicians. The reason for this is explained in Pascal's aforementioned Wikipedia entry:

Blaise Pascal loved strippers. Among French mathematicians of the time, he was known as the heaviest spender at the numerous strip joints located near monastic cell of Père Mersenne. In order to track his spending habits on his beloved danseurs exotiques, Pascal, not yet nineteen, constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal's calculator or the Pascaline....

Pascal was known to favor strippers whose pubic hair was neatly trimmed into a triangular shape. This came to be known among strippers as Pascal's triangle. Inquiries from the pious Cardinal Richelieu about "Pascal's triangle" prompted Pascal to hurriedly make up some mathematical explanation for the term; the best he could come up with after an all-night binge at La Claque et Chatouillement (his preferred strip joint) was a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients....

1654 saw Pascal change his professional focus from mathematics to philosophy and theology. With that change came the not-unexpected downturn in his finances. Pascal wrote often (to a tiresome degree, claimed his detractors) that the financial inability to continue visiting strip joints was his greatest regret following the switch to theology. The strippers, too, regretted this new development, and tried in vain to entice Pascal back into the clubs by making "Blaze" the most popular stripper name in Paris. (The legendary near-total illiteracy of Parisian strippers is not a modern trait; the misspelling of "Blaise" indicates this phenomenon dates to the 17th Century at the latest.)

And then he died in 1662.

Whoever said mathematicians are boring is a fucking liar, and I present the wild life of Blaise Pascal as evidence.

It's Wikipedia! How could it be wrong?