So I hadn’t checked my little mathematician birthdays database in awhile and decided to check it yesterday. It turns out I missed Pascal’s birthday by a day. He was going to get my blog yesterday but I was distracted by freaking out about my final. I’m still freaking out about my final, but I have nothing else to blog about related to it. So Pascal shall get my blog today instead!

Though he only lived the 39 years between 1623 and 1662, Blaise Pascal was an incredibly accomplished mathematician and inventor. He was educated by his father and was still in his teens when he began to explore advanced topics on his own.

He was interested in math (particularly geometry) early on; when he was 16 he wrote an essay on conic sections that was so advanced that Descartes read it and thought that Pascal’s father had actually written it for him.

Little Pascal was also very interested in the idea of a mechanical calculator, and he was strongly motivated to produce the first working prototype of what was called the “Pascaline” in 1642 to help ease his father’s work as tax commissioner for the king of France. The calculator could do addition and subtraction* and was a great help to his father, but because of its cost it failed to be a commercial success.

Probably Pascal’s most famous contribution to mathematics is Pascal’s Triangle and the closely-related Pascal’s rule which states how the triangle is to be constructed. The triangle displays the binomial coefficients resulting from the binomial theorem along with other really cool properties (might have to do a blog just on his triangle here in a bit…). The development of this triangle led to conversations with Fermat, and the two collaborated together to develop probability theory.

In addition to his contributions to math, Pascal also gave the world the hydraulic press, the syringe, and did a whole ton of experiments with vacuums and hydrodynamics (he’s got the SI unit of pressure named after him as well, though that obviously happened much later). Some of his most famous demonstrations of the effect of elevation on atmospheric pressure involved carrying barometers to the tops of churches to see what happened to the mercury levels.

Cool dude, huh? See? 17th-century Europe!!

BLOG COMPLETE!

*The Pascaline was what Leibniz was trying to improve on with his Step Reckoner by including also the functions of multiplication and division.**

**Yes, I have to mention him in every post.