BLAISE PASCAL
(19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662)
Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand and died in Paris, France. He was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher.
Pascal's earliest work was the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and 50 prototypes, he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years.
Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646, he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. His results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In late 1654, he abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the "Lettres provincials" (Provincial letters) and the "Pensées" (Thoughts), the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In this year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
Pascal had poor health especially after his eighteenth year and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.
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