It is said that when history looks upon the life of an individual when their time has passed; it is not the dates on the tombstone that define the man but the dash in between. Such was the case in the life of theologian, philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. Pascal was born on the 19th of June 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand France and died at the age of 39 of tuberculosis on the 19th August 1662 in Paris, but the bulk of his career, his success and life achievement began in his early years. As a young boy, Pascal’s lost his mother and soon afterward his father moved the family, Blaise and his two sisters to Paris. Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal was a mathematician himself and taught Pascal Latin and Greek, which at the time was considered …show more content…
The “Blaise Pascaline,” as referred to in [3] would be considered today as an early version of a calculator. This project derived in part from helping out his father who had been promoted as a tax clerk, a job which required him to perform long calculations at work. Only one other mechanical device was known to add up figures before the Pascaline and that was known as the Schickard's calculating clock, created by German professor Wilhelm Schickard. Unlike Schickard device, Pascal’s calculator had a larger number of production and use despite the somewhat unreliability of the device. The device consisted of a wheel with eight movable parts for dialing and each part corresponding to a particular digit in a number. It worked by using gears and pins to add integers; addends were entered by hand and carriers from one column to the next were broadcast internally by falling weights lifted and dropped by the pins attached to the gears. It could even be manipulated to subtract, multiply and divide if one knew their way around the Pascaline. Subtraction was done by adding the nines complement version of the number being subtracted. Multiplication; accomplished by repeating additions and division performed by repeating subtractions. Balise Pascals went on to inspire directly inspired further work on calculating machines by other inventors such as Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel
Try to imagine life without calculators and how difficult it would be to solve a mathematical problem. However, Charles Babbage is the person to thank and be grateful that we do. Charles Babbage is the inventor of the Difference Engine as well as the Analytical Engine. These inventions were made to calculate different math problems with accuracy and prevent human beings from making errors when solving a math problem. In the following paragraphs you will learn about Charles Babbage early life, educational background, and how his inventions are relevant to today.
In 500 B.C. the abacus was first used by the Babylonians as an aid to simple arithmetic. In 1623 Wihelm Schickard (1592 - 1635) invented a "Calculating Clock". This mechanical machine could add and subtract up to 6 digit numbers, and warned of an overflow by ringing a bell. J. H. Mueller comes up with the idea of the "difference engine", in 1786. This calculator could tabulate values of a polynomial. Muellers attempt to raise funds fails and the project was forgotten. Scheutz and his son Edward produced a 3rd order difference engine with a printer in 1843 and their government agreed to fund their next project.
Mark I. It was actually a electromechanical calculation. It is said that this was the first potentially computers. In 1951 Remington Rand’s came out with the UNIVAC it began
Rene Descartes was a French mathematician born in 1596 in La Haye, France and died in 1650 in Stockholm Sweden. The town’s name where he was born was changed to La Haye-Descartes in 1801, but in 1997 it was changed to just Descartes, France. The house where Descartes was born is now a small museum. He was named after one of his godfathers, Rene Brochard des Fontaines. Descartes fathers name was Joachim Descartes, he was a lawyer and a magistrate (Civil officer or a lay judge who administers the law.) Jeanne Brochard, Descartes mother, died the following May after he was born from giving birth to another child who also died. After his mother’s death, Descartes, his brother Pierre and his sister Jeanne were left to be raised by their grandmother
He lived in Paris for a while in a frivolous manner as a break. His
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...
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 is widely credited with building the first "digital calculating machine" in 1642. It performed only additions of numbers entered by means of dials and was intended to help Pascal's father, who was a tax collector. In 1671, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz invented a computer that was built in 1694; it could add and, by successive adding and shifting, multiply. Leibniz invented a special "stepped gear" mechanism for introducing the addend digits, and this mechanism is still in use. The prototypes built by Leibniz and Pascal were not widely used but remained curiosities until more than a century later, when Tomas of Colmar (Charles Xavier Thomas) developed (1820) the first commercially successful mechanical calculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. A succession of improved "desk-top" mechanical calculators by various inventors followed, so that by about 1890 the available built-in operations included accumulation of partial results, storage and reintroduction of past results, and printing of results, each requiring manual initiation. These improvements were made primarily to suit commercial users, with little attention given to the needs of science.
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...
Known as the “father of computing”, Charles Babbage has inspired many scientists and engineers with his wonderful inventions. His goal was to create a machine that would reduce the possibility of human error in making mathematical calculations. In addition to inventing an early form of the calculator, Babbage also invented the cowcatcher and the first speedometer for trains. Babbage said, “At each increase of knowledge, as well as on the contrivance of every new tool, human labor becomes abridged.” This could possibly mean that he was on his quest for knowledge to help reduce the amount of human labor needed in daily processes. Babbage could only have achieved those great feats because of the fine education he received during his childhood.
Pascal programming language was designed in 1968, and published in 1970. It is a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring. Pascal was developed by Niklaus Wirth. The language was named in honor of the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. In 1641, Pascal created the first arithmetical machine. Some say it was the first computer. Wirth improved the instrument eight years later. In 1650, Pascal left geometry and physics, and started his focus towards religious studies. A generation of students used Pascal as an introduction language in undergraduate courses. Types of Pascal have also frequently been used for everything from research projects to PC games. Niklaus Wirth reports that a first attempt to merge it in Fortran in 1969 was unsuccessful because of Fortran's lack of complex data structures. The second attempt was developed in the Pascal language itself and was operational by mid-1970. A generation of students used Pascal as an introductory language in undergraduate courses. Pascal, in its original form, is a Procedural language and includes the traditional like control structures with reserved words such as IF, THEN, ELSE, WHILE, FOR, and so on. However, Pascal has many data structuring and other ideas which were not included in the original, like type definitions, records, pointers, enumerations, and sets. The earliest computers were programmed in machine code. This type of programming is time consuming and error prone, as well as very difficult to change and understand. Programming is a time-consuming a process. More advanced languages were developed to resolve this problem. High level languages include a set of instruction...
Now we look at Charles Babbage, who many say is the father of computers. Charles Babbage was a professor of mathematics. In the 1800's Babbage designed an automatic calculation machine. This machine was steam powered and could store up to 1000 50-digit numbers. Charles Babbage was so ahead of his time, that the machines that were used back then were not even precise enough to make the parts for his computer. Gulliver, states: