56 Facts About Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.

Blaise Pascal later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.

Blaise Pascal wrote in defense of the scientific method and produced several controversial results.

Blaise Pascal made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Torricelli.

The latter contains Blaise Pascal's wager, known in the original as the Discourse on the Machine, a fideistic probabilistic argument for God's existence.

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, which is in France's Auvergne region, by the Massif Central.

Blaise Pascal lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three.

Blaise Pascal's father, Etienne Pascal, who had an interest in science and mathematics, was a local judge and member of the "Noblesse de Robe".

Blaise Pascal had two sisters, the younger Jacqueline and the elder Gilberte.

In 1631, five years after the death of his wife, Etienne Blaise Pascal moved with his children to Paris.

The young Blaise Pascal showed an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science.

Particularly of interest to Blaise Pascal was a work of Desargues on conic sections.

Blaise Pascal's work was so precocious that Rene Descartes was convinced that Blaise Pascal's father had written it.

Suddenly Etienne Blaise Pascal's worth had dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than 7,300.

Blaise Pascal continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade, and he refers to some 50 machines that were built to his design.

Blaise Pascal built 20 finished machines over the following 10 years.

Blaise Pascal later used a probabilistic argument, Blaise Pascal's wager, to justify belief in God and a virtuous life.

Blaise Pascal defined the numbers in the triangle by recursion: Call the number in the th row and th column tmn.

In 1654, he proved Blaise Pascal's identity relating the sums of the p-th powers of the first n positive integers for p = 0,1,2,.

That same year, Blaise Pascal had a religious experience, and mostly gave up work in mathematics.

In 1658, Blaise Pascal, while suffering from a toothache, began considering several problems concerning the cycloid.

Blaise Pascal's toothache disappeared, and he took this as a heavenly sign to proceed with his research.

Blaise Pascal proposed three questions relating to the center of gravity, area and volume of the cycloid, with the winner or winners to receive prizes of 20 and 40 Spanish doubloons.

Blaise Pascal contributed to several fields in physics, most notably the fields of fluid mechanics and pressure.

In honour of his scientific contributions, the name Blaise Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure and Blaise Pascal's law.

Blaise Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual motion machine.

Blaise Pascal's inventions include the hydraulic press and the syringe.

Blaise Pascal proved that hydrostatic pressure depends not on the weight of the fluid but on the elevation difference.

Blaise Pascal demonstrated this principle by attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of water and filling the tube with water up to the level of the third floor of a building.

Blaise Pascal reasoned that if true, air pressure on a high mountain must be less than at a lower altitude.

Blaise Pascal lived near the Puy de Dome mountain, 4,790 feet tall, but his health was poor so could not climb it.

Blaise Pascal replicated the experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up to the top of the bell tower at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a height of about 50 metres.

Blaise Pascal Chairs are given to outstanding international scientists to conduct their research in the Ile de France region.

Blaise Pascal spoke with the doctors frequently, and after their successful treatment of his father, borrowed from them works by Jansenist authors.

Blaise Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what some biographers have called his "worldly period".

Blaise Pascal's father died in 1651 and left his inheritance to Pascal and his sister Jacqueline, for whom Pascal acted as conservator.

Blaise Pascal was deeply affected and very sad, not because of her choice, but because of his chronic poor health; he needed her just as she had needed him.

Blaise Pascal pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant.

Blaise Pascal commanded her to stay, but that didn't work, either.

In literature, Blaise Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose.

Blaise Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins.

Blaise Pascal is arguably best known as a philosopher, considered by some the second greatest French mind behind Rene Descartes.

Blaise Pascal cared above all about the philosophy of religion.

Blaise Pascal used De l'Esprit geometrique to develop a theory of definition.

Blaise Pascal distinguished between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer and definitions which are within the language and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their referent.

Blaise Pascal claimed that only definitions of the first type were important to science and mathematics, arguing that those fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism as formulated by Descartes.

In De l'Art de persuader, Blaise Pascal looked deeper into geometry's axiomatic method, specifically the question of how people come to be convinced of the axioms upon which later conclusions are based.

Blaise Pascal agreed with Montaigne that achieving certainty in these axioms and conclusions through human methods is impossible.

Blaise Pascal asserted that these principles can be grasped only through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths.

Blaise Pascal designated the operation principles which were later used to plan public transportation: The carriages has a fixed route, fixed price, and left even if there were no passengers.

In 1662, Blaise Pascal's illness became more violent, and his emotional condition had severely worsened since his sister's death.

The headaches which affected Blaise Pascal are generally attributed to his brain lesion.

Blaise Pascal was a subject of the first edition of the 1984 BBC Two documentary, Sea of Faith, presented by Don Cupitt.

The first graphics cards featuring Blaise Pascal were released in 2016.

The 2017 game Nier: Automata has multiple characters named after famous philosophers; one of these is a sentient pacifistic machine named Blaise Pascal, who serves as a major supporting character.

Blaise Pascal creates a village for machines to live peacefully with the androids they're at war with and acts as a parental figure for other machines trying to adapt to their newly-found individuality.