Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to 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, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called pascal's calculator and later pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping 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. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following a mystical experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Pensées, 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.
Read more about Blaise Pascal: Early Life and Education, Contributions To Mathematics, Contributions To The Physical Sciences, Adult Life, Religion, Philosophy, and Literature, Legacy, Works
Famous quotes by blaise pascal:
“The present is never our end. The past and present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it.... There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)