Pascal

Born on June 19, 1623, Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. Pascal was a child prodigy, who was educated by his father. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences, where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators and the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by expanding the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote powerfully in defense of the scientific method.

Blaise lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three. His father, Étienne Pascal (1588-1651), was a local judge and member of the petite noblesse, who also had an interest in science and mathematics. Blaise Pascal was brother to Jacqueline Pascal and two other sisters, only one of whom, Gilberte, survived past childhood.

In 1631, Etienne moved with his children to Paris. Etienne decided that he would educate his son, who showed extraordinary mental and intellectual abilities. Young Blaise showed immediate aptitude for mathematics and science, perhaps inspired by his father's regular conversations with Paris's leading geometricians, including Roberval, Mersenne, Desargues, Mydorge, Gassendi, and Descartes. At the age of eleven, he composed a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies and Etienne responded by forbidding his son to further pursue mathematics until the age of fifteen, so as not to harm his study of Latin and Greek. One day Etienne found Blaise (now twelve) writing on the wall with a piece of coal an independent proof that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. Thenceforth, the boy was allowed to study Euclid.

Particularly of interest to the young Pascal was the work of Desargues. Following Desargues's thinking, at age sixteen Pascal produced a treatise on conic sections, Essai pour les coniques ("Essay on Conics"). Most of it has been lost, but an important original result has lasted, now known as Pascal's theorem. Pascal's work was so precocious that Descartes, when shown the manuscript, refused to believe that the composition was not by his father.

He was a mathematician of the first order. In mathematics, Pascal 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 corresponded with Pierre de Fermat from 1654 on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.

At age eighteen Pascal constructed a mechanical calculator, called Pascal's calculator or the Pascaline, capable of addition and subtraction, to help his father with this work. The Zwinger museum, in Dresden, Germany, exhibits one of his original mechanical calculators. Though these machines stand near the head of the development of computer engineering, the calculator failed to be a great commercial success. Pascal continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade and built a total of fifty machines.

Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he left mathematics and physics and devoted himself to reflection and writing about philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensees. However, he had suffered from ill-health throughout his life and his new interests were ended by his early death on August 19, 1662, two months after his 39th birthday.

Writings:

Provincial letters (1656-57) - A series of eighteen letters written under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte. They are a defense of Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, a friend of Pascal's who in 1656 was condemned by the Facultede Theologie at the Sorbonne in Paris for views that were claimed to be heretical. The first letter is dated January 23, 1656 and the eighteenth March 24, 1657. A fragmentary nineteenth letter is frequently included with the other eighteen. Structurally, the first few letters promote the Jansenist teachings on "proximate power" (Letter I) and "sufficient grace" (Letter II). The later letters find Pascal more on the defensive - pressure on the Port Royal Jansenists to renounce their teachings was constantly growing through this time - and contain the assault on casuistry.

Pensees (1669) - An apology for the Christian religion. It consists of ideas and jottings, some of which are incomplete. The structure of the apology is best described by H.F. Stewart D.D. in the preface to his translation of the Pensees: Part I shows "from Nature" that man is wretched without God, Part II shows "from Scripture" that Jesus is the Redeemer of mankind. Part I subdivides into Ia (man without God) and Ib (man with God) to show man's inherent wretchedness. The themes of Part I are largely in the tone of vanitas mundi, after the tradition of Solomon's book of Ecclesiastes, while the many short maxims inserted into the text are reminiscent of Solomon's Book of Proverbs. The book was not completed before Pascal's death, which makes it difficult to come up with the intended structure.

Influence:

In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics), and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.

Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics. Originally applied to gambling, today it is extremely important in economics, especially in actuarial science. John Ross writes, "Probability theory and the discoveries following it changed the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, and an individual's and society's ability to influence the course of future events." [16] However, it should be noted that Pascal and Fermat, though doing important early work in probability theory, did not develop the field very far. Christiaan Huygens, learning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the subject. Later figures who continued the development of the theory include Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace.

In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period, and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists. The content of his literary work is best remembered for its strong opposition to the rationalism of René Descartes and simultaneous assertion that the main countervailing philosophy, empiricism, was also insufficient for determining major truths.

This information was taken from Wikipedia encyclopedia.
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