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Blaise Pascal was among Cox's highest-rated subjects due to extraordinary documented childhood precocity. His father Étienne Pascal, a French tax administrator, documented his son's early intellectual development in detail. By the methodology Cox used - rewarding well-documented childhood accomplishments - Pascal scored near the top of her three-hundred-figure sample.

At 16 he wrote his Essay on Conics (1640), introducing what is now known as Pascal's theorem. At 19 he built one of the earliest mechanical calculators, the Pascaline, to help his father with tax computations. His correspondence with Pierre de Fermat (1654) on a gambling problem laid the foundations of probability theory.

In adulthood he turned to theology and philosophy, producing the Pensées (published posthumously 1670) and the Provincial Letters. He died at 39 from causes that remain medically debated. His name today is attached to the SI unit of pressure and to the Pascal triangle in combinatorics.