Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal Blaise Pascal was born on June, 19 1623 at Clermont in Auvergne. His father Etienne, was a successful lawyer doing well in his profession. Three years after Pascal’s birth, Etienne lost his wife Antoinette, and found himself responsible for three children, Gilberte, Jacqueline and Blaise who was a sickly child. It seems as though growing up without his mother condemned him to bad health and his development permanently. His father insisted on educating him at home, because he did not want his son to he mistreated in school. Etienne was an accomplished mathematician, lawyer, and thought probably that he could teach his son as well as a schoolteacher. From 1631 until 1640, when Pascal’s family moved to Rouen, he pursued a course of education under his father’s supervision which gave him the opportunity to master, Latin, Greek, mathematics and science. It was in Rouen where Blaise soon

began the career for which his education had prepared him. "Pascal"tms law", or Pascal"tms principle, in fluid mechanics, the principle that in a fluid at rest in a closed container, a pressure change in one part of the fluid is transmitted without loss to every portion of the fluid and to the walls of the container. In 1640 he published a little treatise on projective geometry. He was buried in the parish church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, where his memorial can still be seen, next to what is now the Pantheon. Of his mathematical works, the most solid is to do with what is now called probability theory. Two players have agreed to play dice until one wins three throws. Gilberte, Pascal"tms sister tells a story of how her brother discovered Pythagoras"tm theorem by do-it-yourself methods when he was about twelve. Each has put in 32 pistoles, a substantial sum; one has won two throws, his opponent one. By 1646 he had begun to work on the problem of the vacuum, which was to win him public renown. Today"tms computer is designed on the same essential lines as the mechanical calculator. " Pascal begins with a simple example. By 1644 a Rouen craftsman under his supervision had actually built the first of a small number of machines, all of which worked. In 1642 he invented a calculating machine called the machine arithmetique which is on display in Clermont-Ferrand, where Pascal was born. At the end of June 1662, Pascal was so ill that he moved in with his sister Gilberte, now installed in Paris, and there, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, at the age of thirty-nine, he died in physical distress but spiritual serenity on August 19, 1662.