Pascal, Blaise

French Mathematician and Philosopher 1623–1662

Most students in a mathematics class at some point wonder why. Not "Why does this process or theory work?" but rather "Why do I have to learn this?" Blaise Pascal, a mathematician during the mid-seventeenth century, is certainly one of the people to "blame." Yet Pascal made many contributions to mathematics and society as a whole.

Education for children of the 1600s was very different from modern education. There had been a time during Pascal's youth when his father had forbidden him to study mathematics and physics. Pascal's father even went so far as to lock up all the books to keep them away from his son. It seemed as though his father was embarrassed or worried that he would get in trouble for doing mathematics.

Pascal showed that he was capable of learning mathematics, such as infinitesimal calculus, on his own. This made his father realize that Pascal had a special talent for the subject. Thankfully, his father then allowed him access to all books, and Pascal blossomed in his studies. He even wrote an original treatise on conic sections at the age of 16.

Pascal not only had a natural ability to understand mathematics, but he also was an inventor. His father was a bookkeeper, which meant doing computations by hand. It was quite easy to make a simple mistake while adding and subtracting long columns of numbers. Pascal ultimately created a device that could do addition and subtraction of multiple numbers. Pascal's adding and subtracting device is considered the first calculator—more than 300 years before the modern calculator became more compact and much more sophisticated in its capabilities.

Pascal was also partly responsible for discovering the field of mathematics known as probability theory. He had a friend who was a professional gambler. Pascal's friend could not understand why he was losing when he felt he had a good chance of winning. With the help of another French mathematician, Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665), Pascal studied the probability of dice-throwing and other such games of chance. Ultimately this work on probability led to a treatise on binomial coefficients, the table of which is now known as Pascal's triangle.

Pascal died at the age of 39, but he left behind quite a legacy of knowledge in geometry, probability, physics, calculus, and a number of inventions, including the syringe and the hydraulic press. After his death, his sister found boxes and drawers full of scraps of paper with Pascal's writing on them. She published the papers posthumously and titled the collection Pensées (1670), meaning thoughts. Every student should be familiar with at least one quotation from the work: "When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing."

Pascal, Blaise

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