Blaise Pascal

A detailed Summary of Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont France on June 19, 1623 to Etienne Pascal. His mother died when he was only 3. He was the third of four children and the only boy. He was described as a man of: small stature, poor health, loud spoken, somewhat overbearing, precious, stubbornly persevering, a perfectionist, highly pugnacious yet seeking to be humble and meek.

Pascal's father had somewhat unorthodox views on education, so he decided to teach his son himself. He forbade any mathematic teachings or material to be given to him and had any such texts removed from their house. Blaise became engulfed with curiosity due to this rule. He started to work with geometry on his own at the age of 12. He discovered that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is equivalent to two right angles. When his father discovered this he then allowed Blaise a copy of Euclid.

At the age of 14 Blaise began accompanying his father to Mersenne's meetings. Mersenne was a member of a religious order of Minims. His cell held many meetings for the likes of Gassendi, Roberval, Carcavi, Auzout, Mydorge, Mylon, Desargues and others. By the time he was 15 Blaise admired the work of Desargues greatly. At 16 Pascal presented a single piece of paper at a Mersenn

Pascal faced problems with the design of the calculator due to the design of French currency at the time. There were 12 deniers in a sol, and 20 sols in a livre. Therefore there were 240 deniers in a livre. Hence Pascal had to deal with more technical problems to work with this odd way of dividing by 240. Yet the currency system remained the same in France until 1799, but Britain's similar system lasted until 1971. Production of the Pascaline began in 1642. It was recorded by Adamson that:

In 1646 Etienne Pascal injured his leg and had to recuperate in his house. Two young brothers from a religious movement outside of Rouen came to help take care of him. Pascal was affected deeply and became very religious. It was at this time that Pascal began many experiments on atmospheric pressure. By 1647 he proved to himself that a vacuum existed. Descartes visited Pascal September the 23rd for 2 days in which they argued about the vacuum which Descartes did not believe existed. Descartes wrote a rather cruel letter to Huygens after visiting the young Pascal. he believed "...has too much vacuum in his head."

Pascal was not the only one to study the Pascal triangle, but his work on the topic Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle as the most important. With the work of Wallis, Pascal's work on the binomial coefficients was to lead to the binomial theorem discovery by Newton for fractional and negative powers.

e's meeting in June 1639. It held many of his geometry theorems, including his mystic hexagon.

Pascal published his own solutions to his own problems in the Letters to Carcavi. This seemed to be his last great interest in science. He spent his last years giving to the poor and attending church in Paris one service after another. He died at the age of 39 in intense pain after a malignant growth in his stomach spread to the brain.

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Approximate Word count = 1538
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People