Blaise Pascal Facts
Blaise Pascal Facts
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| Interesting Blaise Pascal Facts: |
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| Pascal's early education in France was conducted at home by his father due to the prodigious talent and understanding he showed as a child. |
| At age sixteen, he wrote an essay on what was known as the "Mystic Hexagram." |
| This essay was called his "Essay on Conics," which he sent to Père Mersenne. |
| This theorem, which is known to this day as Pascal's theorem, was so profound that critics like Descartes were initially certain that Pascal's father had written. |
| Pascal's theorem states that a hexagon inscribed in a circle, or conic, forms a line where the three points of opposite sides lie. The line is known as the Pascal line. |
| Other major contributions Pascal made while still in his teenaged years include being one of only two people who developed and constructed a working mechanical calculator. |
| Pascal built the mechanical device while his father struggled to make sense of the tax situation in Rouen. |
| He built it over the course of three years and made over fifty prototypes for his machine, which was initially cumbersome and expensive. |
| As a mathematician, Pascal developed two separate fields of maths: projective geometry and probability theory. |
| This probability theory was born out of Pascal's study of gambling problems, and had an important impact on the development of modern day economics. |
| Pascal also developed what became known as Pascal's triangle, in which the sums of successive numbers built on themselves to form the numerical row beneath. |
| In the sciences, Pascal's theories were important to understanding the properties and volume of solids using cycloids. |
| A religious experience when he was a young man led Pascal to make important contributions to Christian philosophy and theology through many of his writings. |
| Pascal also wrote at length about the need for the scientific method. |
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