Blaise Pascal

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Blaise Pascal

The programming language Pascal is named for the inventor of one of the earliest known mechanical calculators, the French mathematician and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662).
Pascal's father, Etienne, was a noble in the French court, a lax collector, and a mathematician. Pascal's mother died when he was three years old. Five years later, the family moved to Paris and Etienne took over the education of the children. Pascal quickly showed a talent for mathematics. When he was only 17. he published a mathematical essay that earned the jealous envy of Rent Descartes, one of the founders of modem geometry. (Pascal's work actually had been completed before he was 16.) It was based on a theorem, which he called the hexagrammum mvslicum, or mysticihiil described the inscription of hexagons in conic sections (parabolas, hyperbolas, and ellipses). In addition to the theorem (now called Pascal's theorem), his essay included over 400 corollaries.

When Pascal was about 20, he constructed a mechanical calculator that performed addition and subtraction of 8-digit numbers. That calculaior required the user to dial in the numbers to be added or subtracted: then the sum or difference appeared in a set of windows. It is believed that his motivation for building this machine was to help his father in his tax-collecting work; the earliest version of the machine does indeed split the numbers into six decimal digits and two fractional digits, as would be used for calculating sums of money. The machine was hailed by his contemporaries as a great advance in mathematics, and Pascal built several more in different forms. It achieved such popularity that many fake, nonfunctional copies were built by others and displayed as novelties. Several of Pascal's calculators still exist in various museums.
Pascal's box, as it is called, was long believed to be the first mechanical calculator.
However, in 1950, a letter from Wilhelm Shickard to Johannes Kepler written in 1624 was discovered. This letter described an even more sophisticated calculator built by Shickard 20 years before Pascal's box. Unfortunately, the machine was destroyed in a fire and never rebuilt.
During his twenties, Pascal solved several difficult problems related to the cycloid curve, indirectly contributing to the development of differential calculus. Working with Pierre de Fermat, he laid the foundation of the calculus of probabilities and combinatorial analysis. One of the results of this work came to be known as Pascal's triangle—which simplifies the calculation of the coefficients of the expansion of (x + y)", where n is a positive integer.
Pascal also published a treatise on air pressure and conducted experiments that showed that barometric pressure decreases with altitude, helping to confirm theories that had been proposed by Galileo and Torricelli. His work on fluid dynamics forms a significant part of the foundation of that field. Among the most famous of his contributions is Pascal's law, which states that pressure applied to a fluid in a closed vessel is transmitted uniformly throughout the fluid.
When Pascal was 23, his father became ill, and the family was visited by two disciples of Jansenism, a reform movement in the Catholic Church that had begun six years earlier. The family converted, and five years later one of his sisters entered a convent. Initially Pascal was not taken with the new movement, but by the time he was 31, his sister had persuaded him to abandon the world and devote himself to religion.
His religious works were no less brilliant than his mathematical and scientific writings. His Provincial Letters, a series of 18 essays on various aspects of religion, are considered by some to mark the beginning of modern French prose.
Pascal returned briefly to mathematics when he was 35, but a year later his health, which had always been poor, took a turn for the worse. Unable to perform regular work, he devoted himself to helping the less fortunate. Three years after that, he died while staying with his sister, having given his own house to a poor family.