Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was born on the 19^th of June 1623, in the town of Clermont Ferrand, in France. He was a French mathematician, physician. He was also a writer and an inventor. Pascal was a rival of René Descartes. His father was an amateur mathematician and a scientist. That’s why his son started working at the age of 12. First, he worked only on geometry and discovered what is known that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals to 180°. Then he discovered what is known today as Pascal’s Theorem. Blaise Pascal wrote a number of precocious mathematical theorems before the age of 18.

One of them was the “Pascal’s Theorem”. The set of the numbers that form Pascal’s Triangle were well known before Pascal. But, Pascal developed many applications of it and was the first one to organize all the informations together. He is regarded as the founder of the modern theory of probability. In 1642, after 3 years of effort, he invented the mechanical calculator called “Pascaline”.

Later, he worked on Physics and found that there was a vacuum above the atmosphere. Blaise Pascal was suffering from a painful nervous condition and became paralyzed in 1647. Finally, he died in 1662 in Paris, because of his stomach cancer.