Blaise Pascal was a great mathematician who lived in 17th Century France. His mother was Antoinette Begon; she died when Blaise was three. His father, Etienne took the responsibility of bringing him up. Pascal had two sisters, Gilberte and Jacqueline.
Pascal began his studies in 1635 with his reading of Euclid’s Elements and mastered them by age 12. This won the boy respect for his great talent in mathematics. Pascal in fact did not attend school; instead, Etienne brought him to lectures and mathematical gatherings at the “Academie Parsienne” nearly from its founding. At the early age of 16, Pascal began to play an active role in “Academie Parisienne”. There, Pascal became the principal disciple of Girard Desargues, a professor working there because he was the only one who appreciated his work in geometry. Pascal began work on conics and published several papers to do with geometry. In fact, in June 1639, Pascal has already made a significant discovery with his “mystical hexagram”.
In 1641, he began to suffer from problems of health that delayed his research for a year, but he recovered and continued his work.
In 1642, Pascal began to create a machine that would be similar to an everyday calculator to help his father with his accounting job. His first attempts were failures and Pascal was discouraged from working on the project for many years. He returned to it in 1644 because of the encouragement of many people. He finished the final model in 1645 after going through more than 50 incarnations of the design, he finished the final model in 1645, Pascal himself did the selling with a few associates but because of it’s high price of and limited uses, sales were probably modest. He did present one to Queen Christina of Sweden and he was allowed a monopoly over it by royal decree.
Although Pascal had been raised as a Catholic, later in his life, Pascal had been converted to Jansenism in 1646 and moved to a monastery in Port Royal in France. But in 1658, he left the monastery to continue his mathematical work. Pascal then worked on many mathematical problems, including how fluids and gases behave (1646) this proved that the mercury in a barometer did not move because of a vacuum but rather because of barometric pressure, created “Pascal’s Triangle” which calculated the probabilities of winning in gambling (1654) which today has been important in the study of statistics and even modern day physics, and the theory of indivisibles (1658).
He took his teaching duties very seriously, while he was preparing lectures for his charge on variety an of topics about science. The first scientific work dates were all from this period. It involves topics, which would continue to occupy him throughout his life. In 1571, he began publication of his track. It was intended to form a preliminary mathematical part of a major study on the Ptolemaic astronomical model. He continued to embrace the Ptolemaic (Parshall 1).
Blaise Pascal was born on 19 June 1623 in Clermont Ferrand. He was a French mathematician, physicists, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy that was educated by his father. After a horrific accident, Pascal’s father was homebound. He and his sister were taken care of by a group called Jansenists and later converted to Jansenism. Later in 1650, the great philosopher decided to abandon his favorite pursuits of study religion. In one of his Pensees he referred to the abandonment as “contemplate the greatness and the misery of man”.
Blaise Pascal was in born in 1623. In Clermont France he was very well known to most people. His mother’s name was Antoinette she passed away when he was only three years old. That left his father to take care of the children. He had two sisters there name was Gilberte also Jacqueline. They moved to a new house after his mother had passed away. The only reason that they moved he didn’t trust his son’s education at the local schools where they lived. It was a huge desion that he had to make to be able to teacher Blaise himself. He thought that they education that he could provide him was just as good as he would receive at a local school close by. Most of his adult life was mainly dedicated to his religion and philosophy. Several members of his family loved math and science. His interested began when his dad gave him a project that he was not taught to do. Blaise asked very sorts of questions to his father and he would reply. He would say that it was away to make figures. Also to find the proportions of the figures. Which at the time that didn’t make any since to Blaise. He would take what his father told him to make his own discovers about math. His sister began telling everyone that Pascal made his own geometry which everyone didn’t believe her. When he turned twelve he began to draw figures on his bedroom floor. He then found out that interior angles add up the sum of two right angles itself. People didn’t believe that drawing figures on the floor. He would be able to come up with the formula without knowing it. He did the same thing for days he didn’t care if his father caught him or not. His dad was very proud of him since he was very smart his dad rewarded him with Euclid’s Elements. He didn’t give up on his math study. H...
Yang Hui has been found to be the oldest user of Pascal’s Triangle. But it is Blaise Pascal who around the year 1654 was credited for his extensive work on the many patterns of this triangle. Because of this people began to call it Pascal’s Triangle.
When Sir Isaac Newton was in university he kept a journal where he was able to express his ideas on different topics. He became very interested in math after he bought a book at a fair and did not understand the math concepts in it. Newton graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1665. However, the continuation of his education was interrupted by the plague. It was because of this, he spent 18 months back in Lincolnshire. During this time New...
His father taught his Latin but after a while saw his son’s greater passion towards mathematics. However, Andre resumed his Latin lessons to enable him to study the work of famous mathematicians Leonhard Euler and Bernoulli. While in the study of his father’s library his favorite study books were George Louis Leclerc history book and Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond Encyclopedia, became Ampere’s schoolmasters (Andre). When Ampere finished in his father’s library he had his father take him to the library in Lyon. While there he studied calculus. A couple of weeks later he was able to do difficult treaties on applied mathematics (Levy, Pg. 135). Later in life he said “the new as much about mathematics when he was 18, than he knew in his entire life. His reading...
Etienne Pascal was very concerned about his son becoming an educated man. This is why he decided to teach his son on his own. He brought a young Blaise to lectures and other gatherings. He decided Blaise would not study math until age 15. When he made this decision he took all the math books out of the family home; however, this did not stop a curious Pascal. At age twelve, he started to work on geometry by himself. Blaise’s father finally started to take him to mathematical gatherings at "Academic Parisienne." At the age of 16, Pascal began to play an active role in "Academic Parisienne," as the principal disciple of Girard Desargues, one of the heads of "Academic Par...
Computer engineering started about 5,000 years ago in China when they invented the abacus. The abacus is a manual calculator in which you move beads back and forth on rods to add or subtract. Other inventors of simple computers include Blaise Pascal who came up with the arithmetic machine for his father’s work. Also Charles Babbage produced the Analytical Engine, which combined math calculations from one problem and applied it to solve other complex problems. The Analytical Engine is similar to today’s computers.
Blaise Pascal lived during a time when religion and science were clashing and challenging previous discoveries and ideas. Pascal lived from 1623 to 1662 due to his untimely death at the age of thirty nine. The scientific community grew enormously and Pascal was a great contributor to this growth. The growth in the scientific community is known as the Scientific Revolution. He lived in a time where an absolute monarch came into power, King Louis the XIV. Louis XIV was a believer in “one king, one law, and one faith” (Spielvogel, 2012). Pascal saw the destruction of protestant practices in France and the growth and acceptance of scientific discoveries. He used the scientific method to refine previous experiments that were thought to be logical but Pascal proved otherwise and eventually led to Pascal’s Law. He spent his life devoted to two loves: God and science. Within his book, “Pensees,” Pascal argues and shares his thoughts about God, science, and philosophy.
Blaise Pascal was many things, a physicist, an inventor, a writer, and even a Christian philosopher, but the one thing that most remember him by is a mathematician. Pascal was a very successful man, but in order to fully understand how his success came about, one must go back to his beginning.
If you have ever heard the phrase, “I think; therefore I am.” Then you might not know who said that famous quote. The author behind those famous words is none other than Rene Descartes. He was a 17th century philosopher, mathematician, and writer. As a mathematician, he is credited with being the creator of techniques for algebraic geometry. As a philosopher, he created views of the world that is still seen as fact today. Such as how the world is made of matter and some fundamental properties for matter. Descartes is also a co-creator of the law of refraction, which is used for rainbows. In his day, Descartes was an innovative mathematician who developed many theories and properties for math and science. He was a writer who had many works that explained his ideas. His most famous work was Meditations on First Philosophy. This book was mostly about his ideas about science, but he had books about mathematics too. Descartes’ Dream: The World According to Mathematics is a collection of essays talking about his views of algebra and geometry.
The fist computer, known as the abacus, was made of wood and parallel wires on which beads were strung. Arithmetic operations were performed when the beads were moved along the wire according to “programming” rules that had to be memorized by the user (Soma, 14). The second earliest computer, invented by Blaise Pascal in 1694, was a “digital calculating machine.” Pascal designed this first known digital computer to help his father, who was a tax collector. Pascal’s computer could only add numbers, and they had to be entered by turning dials (Soma, 32). It required a manual process like its ancestor, the abacus. Automation was introduced in the early 1800’s by a mathematics professor named Charles Babbage. He created an automatic calculation machine that was steam powered and stored up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Unlike its two earliest ancestors, Babbage’s invention was able to perform various operations. It relied on cards with holes punched in them, which are called “punch cards.” These cards carried out the programming and storing operations for the machine. Unluckily, Babbage’s creation flopped due to the lack of mechanical precision and the lack of demand for the product (Soma, 46). The machine could not operate efficiently because technology was t adequate to make the machine operate efficiently Computer interest dwindled for many years, and it wasn’t until the mid-1800’s that people became interested in them once again.
Burton, D. (2011). The History of Mathematics: An Introduction. (Seventh Ed.) New York, NY. McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
The history of the computer dates back all the way to the prehistoric times. The first step towards the development of the computer, the abacus, was developed in Babylonia in 500 B.C. and functioned as a simple counting tool. It was not until thousands of years later that the first calculator was produced. In 1623, the first mechanical calculator was invented by Wilhelm Schikard, the “Calculating Clock,” as it was often referred to as, “performed it’s operations by wheels, which worked similar to a car’s odometer” (Evolution, 1). Still, there had not yet been anything invented that could even be characterized as a computer. Finally, in 1625 the slide rule was created becoming “the first analog computer of the modern ages” (Evolution, 1). One of the biggest breakthroughs came from by Blaise Pascal in 1642, who invented a mechanical calculator whose main function was adding and subtracting numbers. Years later, Gottfried Leibnez improved Pascal’s model by allowing it to also perform such operations as multiplying, dividing, taking the square root.
The 17th Century saw Napier, Briggs and others greatly extend the power of mathematics as a calculator science with his discovery of logarithms. Cavalieri made progress towards the calculus with his infinitesimal methods and Descartes added the power of algebraic methods to geometry. Euclid, who lived around 300 BC in Alexandria, first stated his five postulates in his book The Elements that forms the base for all of his later Abu Abd-Allah ibn Musa al’Khwarizmi, was born abo...