Blaise Pascal
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.
The young Pascal began to participate with his father in Mersenne's Circle, a
weekly discussion group of scientists and mathematicians, In this plantation of intellects,
he learned from Girard Desargues, who had just published a projective geometry book
but was not well received because of the difficult vocabulary and style. Pascal was one of
the few to appreciate his work. When he was 16, he presented a projective geometry
paper at the meeting about what is now called the "mystic hexagon" which impressed
everyone. One of his sisters wrote an account of her brother's life saying the paper was so
well received that young Pascal was considered to be the best mathematici...