In his short life, Blaise Pascal was able to make major contributions to many of the fields of science that were rapidly developing in the seventeenth century, including projective geometry probability theory, and hydraulics. He also developed one of the earliest calculating machines for mathematical computation.
Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand. His mother died when he was three and the young Pascal was raised by his father, who supervised his education, which focused mainly upon studying ancient languages. Pascal was a weak and sickly child, but he exhibited a formidable intellect at an early age and showed a keen ability to teach himself the principles of science. His penchant for geometry, which stemmed from his reading of Euclid's Elements at the age of 12, was recognized by his father who encouraged his son in the study of mathematics. By the time he was 16, Pascal was attending meetings of the Academie Parisienne and had become the principal disciple in geometry of the mathematician Girard Desargues (1591-1661). Building on the ideas of his mentor, Pascal published a pamphlet in 1640 on the mathematical attributes of sections of cones. This paper presented the outlines of a much larger essay that would, presumably, come later. Unfortunately, the final treatise was never published, although a manuscript copy was apparently seen by Gottfried Leibniz. Even without a complete published work on conics, Pascal's work in this area was enough to contribute greatly to the successful development of projective geometry in the nineteenth century.
Pascal directed his energies to the creation of a computing machine, the pascaline, which was capable of adding and subtracting numbers. In 1642, Pascal had worked out the design of his machine but was unable to produce a dependable, and saleable, mechanical version until 1645. The machine never generated the significant profit that Pascal had hoped for. Nevertheless, the pascaline was the predecessor of increasingly sophisticated devices such as adding machines and, ultimately, modern-day calculators and computers.
While he was working on the details of manufacturing his calculating machine, Pascal became interested in a scientific controversy that was raging in 1647. The debate centered on whether or not a vacuum, the complete absence of matter, could actually exist in nature. Eminent scientists such as René Descartes maintained that a vacuum was impossible, while others such as Maggiotti, Berti and Evangelista Torricelli had performed experiments which seemed to indicate that nature could preserve a vacuum under certain conditions. Torricelli, in particular, had created an instrument called the barometer which he claimed contained a vacuum in its empty portion. This device, said Torricelli, measured the pressure of air, or barometric pressure. Pascal began building a number of barometers, and upheld the view that they worked on the principles of air pressure and contained vacua . Pascal also arranged a famous experiment in which a barometer was taken up the mountainside of the Puy de Dôme in 1648, showing that, as altitude increased, air pressure decreased and therefore air indeed had weight. His defense of the idea of the vacuum led to a more modern understanding of physical forces. It was also part of Pascal's formulation of the hydraulic principle; that pressure exerted on a fluid in a closed vessel is transmitted unchanged throughout the fluid. Today, the applications of this discovery are commonplace in devices such as hydraulic presses, automobile brakes, and aircraft controls.
Pascal became more and more interested in religious matters. In 1646, while involved in his vacuum experiments, Pascal started idenitifying with Jansenism, a Catholic movement strongly influenced by the teachings of St. Augustine. Pascal's acceptance of Jansenism profoundly influenced the direction of the rest of his life. He would spend less time with experiments; and when his father passed away in 1651, Pascal became even more devout. Most of the remainder of his short life would be devoted to meditation and religious writing. (In fact, his spiritual writings, such as the Pensées, would make an impact on religious philosophy nearly equal to the effect his scientific work had upon physics and mathematics.)
Nevertheless, Pascal never completely lost interest in mathematical studies. In 1654, at the age of 31, Pascal entered into a correspondence with Pierre de Fermat in which, together, they studied the frequency of the occurrence of certain combinations in the fall of dice. In pursuing this work, Pascal and Fermat laid the foundations of the calculus of probability, a branch of mathematics dedicated to analyzing how frequently "random" events occur over the long run. In 1658 and 1659, Pascal worked on the problems of calculating areas and volumes of complex shapes using his "theory of indivisibles" which was the forerunner of integral calculus.
Pascal's last important effort, at the age of 39, was the design of a public transit system for the city of Paris which was implemented in 1662, the same year he died. Today, Pascal is remembered for his prodigious contributions to several important branches of science, made more remarkable by his tragically short life.
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