About Pascal

Biography of Pascal

Blaise Pascal was born at Clairmont of Auvergne. He was born on June 19, 1623. The name of his mother was Antoinette and she was from the wealthy family of Begon's. She died in 1626. The name of his father was Etienne who was the first president of the court in Clairmont. Etienne was a determined social climber. The France of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, the foreign minister, was roched by savage peasant revolts, and loyal officers of the state like Etienne occasionally ware assassinated. Etienne Pascal was an intelligent man with a wide range of intellectual interests; he was especially devoted to science and mathematics and seems to have been a fairly talented mathematician. Blaise Pascal also had three sisters. The older of them died. Gilberte who was born in 1620 and Jacquline who was born in 1625. In 1631 Etienne Pascal with his motherless children moved to Paris, so as to let them have an adequate scientific education.

Etienne feared that his son's education in foreign languages might suffer because he was very interested in mathematics and physics. Therefore Etienne told Blaise's friends not to talk about mathematics in front of his son. However Blaise continued to improve his knowledge in those fields of science. Even on the floor of his lonely room, where his father had sent him to get on with his studies of languages, Blaise continued to deal with science and especially with geometry.

Blaise espoused Jansenism and in 1654 he entered the Jansenist community at Port Royal, where he led a rigorously ascetic life until his death. To a large degree, Blaise's extreme religiosity was fuelled by agonizingly poor health and a pent-up sexuality - he apparently was a homosexual - and he punished himself for his sins. The Jansenists finally considered heretic. But Blaise stayed loyal to their belief till his death.

Pascal's Works

Scientific Works

The move of Pascal family to Paris was very beneficial for Blaise. When Blaise was eleven he delivered a thesis about the beginning and discontinuation of sound. In that thesis he investigated such questions as why a key if struck with a knife produces a sound, and why this sound ends immediately when the key is touched with the hand. Later he discovered and proved that the sum of the three angles of a triangle equals to 180 degrees. Even on the floor of his room where his father had restricted him, little Blaise drew all sorts of geometrical shapes the proper names of which he often didn't even know, and he discovered all the fundamental rules between them that are nowadays the subject of early mathematical education.

At sixteen, he wrote an essay on conic sections that proved a fundamental theorem about geometric shapes inscribed in conic sections. He supposedly derived four hundred corollaries from the theorem. Most mathematicians couldn't believe that some of those works were written from a boy. One of them, Rene Descatres, one of the seventeenth century's most important mathematicians and philosophers, suspected that all those works were Blaise's father, Etienne's. It took him a while to realize that Blaise was a genius.

Blaise's short life was full of accomplishment. When he was twenty years old, in addition to inventing a calculator and producing several mathematical treatises, he demonstrated the existence of atmospheric pressure and of vacuums. When he was 30 years old he invented the syringe and the hydraulic press, and enunciated the basic principle of hydraulics - principle now knows as Pascal's law. And along with Pierre de Fermat, the Swiss mathematician, he laid the foundations of the theory of probability, a project that began as a favour for a card-playing nobleman who wanted to know more about the odds of the draw.

Blaise had also a great interest in the affairs of the world. He and a team of other men introduced one of the earliest public transportation systems in Europe, a bus line in the centre of Paris. He developed that work shortly before he died at the age of 39. He then had great pain, because of ulcer and stomach cancer.

In the Eyes of the World, the first mechanical calculator was invented by Blaise Pascal. This machine is able mainly of adding numbers. It can also subtract numbers but with a more complicated method and finally it is able to multiply or divide numbers but those two operations are almost impossible for large numbers. The machine is named Pascaline.

Philosophical Works

To defend Jansenists, Blaise wrote the famous 18 Lettres provinviales, in which he attacked the Jesuits for their attempts to reconcile 16th-century naturalism with orthodox Roman Catholicism. Those Letters are composing a model of perfect French prose. With those letters Blaise abstained from scientific pursuits and devoted himself to the castigation of the Jeuists, the atheists and the philosophy.

Blaise Pascal's final important work was Pensees sur la religion et sur qquelques autres sujets (Thoughts on Religion and on Other Subjects) which was published after his death. In that work he tried to explain and justify the difficulties of human life by the doctrine of original sin and he proclaims that Christianism is the only way for the solution of human problems. He also reasoned that the value of eternal happiness is infinite and that, although the probability of gaining such happiness by religion may be small, it is infinitely greater than by any other course of human conduct or belief.

Evaluation

Blaise is one of the greatest might-have-beens in science. There's is no telling what he might have accomplished had he not died so young and had he not. But anyway Pascal was one of the most eminent mathematicians and physicists of his day and one of the greatest mystical writers in Christian literature. Apart from their theological content, Pensees compose an achievement of the French prose, that place Blaise Pascal between the coryphaeus French writers. Pascal's prose style is noted for its originality and for its total lack of artifice. He affects his readers by his use of logic and the passionate force of his dialectic.