A Biography on Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was born in France in the region of Auvergne in the town of Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. He came from a Catholic family, not surprising since France was known in the Middle Ages as the Eldest Daughter of the Church (Coulumbe, 2012). Religion, like science and math, was very important to Pascal and his family. Indeed, his father had expressed many of the same interests that motivated Blaise—so the apple did not fall far from the tree with respect to the scholarly direction that Blaise’s life took as he grew up. However, his health was never very robust, and Blaise Pascal only lived to be 39. Nonetheless, by the time of his death, he had made important contributions in all three areas of interest—religion, science and math. His most famous works include Pensees and Provincial Letters. Pensees was a philosophical-theological work that examined the disputes between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, a Catholic sect that had emerged in France during the Protestant Reformation and that Pascal identified with to some extent.
Pascal’s mother died when he was very young and his father moved the family to Paris shortly thereafter (Devlin, 2008). Pascal’s father took up the responsibility of educating his children, which is most likely the reason Blaise took after his father’s love of math and science. By the age of 16, Blaise Pascal was already writing proofs—his first being an “Essay on Conics” in line with an argument made by another French thinker Desargues. The essay became known as Pascal’s theorem, and the crux of it is that if a hexagon is inscribed in a conic, the three points of intersection on opposite sides will occur on a line which is known today as the Pascal line. It was a remarkable work by a young 16 year old and bode well for the young French scholar (Devlin, 2008). In fact, the work was full of so much erudition that the...
References
Coulumbe, C. (2012). Oldest daughter of the church. Retrieved from http://catholicism.org/oldest-daughter-of-the-church.html
Devlin, K. (2008). The unfinished game: Pascal, Fermat and the seventeenth-century letter that made the modern world. NY: Basic Books.
Muir, J. (1996). Of men and numbers. NY: Dover.
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