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On the 19th of June, 1923, Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont in France. His mother died when Blaise was only at the age of 3, and it was his father, Etienne Pascal, who took care of Blaise and his three sisters. In 1931, when Blaise was 11 years old, the family moved to Paris. The reasons for moving were that the father could prosecute his scientific studies, and he could also give Blaise a good education in Paris. Pascals father had a very special view on education, and therefore he decided to teach his son by himself. He also decided that Blaise shouldn’t learn any mathematics until he was 15, and he didn’t get access to any books containing mathematic texts at all. Of course this made the young boy very curious, and one day when he was 12, he asked one of his teachers what geometry was. The teacher told him that it was the science of constructing exact figures and determing the proportions between their different parts. Pascal started using all his sparetime trying to learn geometry, and as the great natural genius he was, he soon started to discover many properties of the figures. It was very imposing when he discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles. When his father saw the great ability of his son, he gave up on his own principles and gave Blaise Euclids Elements. It didn’t take long until Pascal mastered this book, and his new interest was really put on fire. At the very young age of 14, Pascals father started bringing him to weekly meetings with Marin Marsenne and other French geometricans. Two years later, when he was 16, Pascal presented some of his own work and theories on one of these meetings. As 1639 soon was ended, the Pascal family left Paris to live in Rouen where Etienne had got a job as a tax collector for Upper Normandy. Shortly after moving there, in February 1640, Blaise had his first work, Essay on Conic Sections, published. Between 1642 and 1645 Pascal worked on and invented the first digital calculator to help his father with his work collecting taxes. The device called the Pascaline, was the same as a mechanical calculator of the 1940's. Pascal was the second person in history to invent a mechanical calculator, as Schickard manufactured one in 1624. There were problems faced by Pascal in the design of the calculator. The problems was caused by the French currency at the time. There were 20 sols in a livre and 12 deniers in a sol. It was a lot harder to make the divisions of the livre into 240 work, than it would have been if the divisions were into 100. They started to produce the machines in 1642, but it didn’t become a success. By 1652, fifty prototypes had been produced, but few machines were sold, and the manufacturing of Pascals arithmetical calculator ceased later that year. In 1646 Pascals father injured his leg, and he to had stay at home. To make sure he was well, two young men from a religious movement took care of him. They found an effect on the young Pascal, and from then Blaise was deeply religious. It was also about this time Pascal began doing lots of experiments on atmospheric pressure. In 1647 he had proved the fact that a vacuum existed. Nobody at that time did really belive that vacuum was possible, and Pascal was delighted. In November, Descartes dropped in for a visit that only lasted two days. The two of them argued about the vacuum, and Descartes did not believe in it. In a letter to Huygens, Descartes wrote rather nasty that "Pascal has too much vacuum in his head." In October Pascal wrote New Experiments Concerning Vacuums, and lots of other scientists were seriously mad. In these years Pascal showed great interest not only in mathematics, but he also became addicted to physics. By the end of the summer 1648 Pascal had observed that the pressure in the atmosphere decreases with height and he found that a vacuum existed above the atmosphere. 1951 was a tragic year for Pascal. In September his father, Etienne, died, and Pascal wrote a letter for his sister. He gave a deep christian meaning for death in general, and particulary his fathers death. His ideas and thoughts in this letter was the source for his later philosophical masterpiece, Pensèes. Two years later, in 1953, he made his most distinctive and important contribution to physical theory. In Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids he explains Pascals law of pressure. The following years Pascal studied geometry, and wrote a lots of texts concerning this theme. Even though he was not the first to study it, Blaise was the one that made the biggest breakthroughs working on Pascals Triangle. In 1954 Pascals nearly lost his life in an accident. He was in a carriage, and on a bridge the wagon nearly fell into the river. Pascal was not hurt, but psychologicaly he was damaged. He wrote down this happening, and the rest of his life he kept the piece of paper close to his heart. He also got into a very religious state later that year. At this time, Pascal didn't use as much time on science. God was more important, and it was about God he kept thinking. Soon Pascal became very ill. He had to go through a lot of pain, and the pain kept him awake at nights. As he was lying there, without managing to sleep, he thought alot about mathematics, and especially probability. This thinking was the last serious scientific work Pascal did. The coming years he spend going from church to church, and helping the poor ones. In 1962 Blaise Pascal died, only at the age of 39. He died in intense pain, and the cause for this was cancer. When he draw his final breath, a great scientist left the world. Pascals character is described as ... precocious, stubbornly persevering, a perfectionist, pugnacious to the point of bullying ruthlessness yet seeking to be meek and humble ... |