By Victoria Hubble

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, on June 19th, 1623. His

mother, Antoinette Begon, died when he was three; and his father, Etienne, who was a

local judge with a scientific reputation, brought him up. Etienne Pascal retired and

moved to Paris in 1631 to concentrate on his own scientific research and to take care of

his son, Blaise, and his two daughters, Gilberte and Jaqueline. Etienne had unorthodox

views of education and decided to tutor his only son himself. Etienne Pascal locked up all

the mathematics texts in the house because he believed that it was too exciting for young

minds to be studying mathematics before the age of 15 and he was not going to sap his

gifted child's energy from all other pursuits. At age 12, Blaise was curious about

geometry and deduced as far as Proposition 32 of Euclid's Elements ( the sum of angles

of a triangle are two right angles) by himself without any mathematics training. When his

father found out, Blaise was allowed to read his father's mathematics books, because his

father knew that he couldn't stop his genius son anymore.

Cycloid Work. His last work was on the cycloid, the curve traced by a point

everyone. One of his sisters wrote an account of her brother's life saying the paper was so

Carcavi in June 1647 about Pascal's experiment saying:- (It was I who two years ago

became deeply religious. From about this time Pascal began a series of experiments on

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Approximate Word count = 2194
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)