Blaise Pascal

Paper Summary:

The paper relates that Blaise Pascal is the rare case of a mathematician equally famous for his religious devotion and contributions to theology as he is for his work with numbers. The paper looks at Pascal's notable discoveries in geometry, his work in probability that formed the foundation of today's economic study of game theory, his prototype of the modern digital, scientific calculator and his law of pressure.

Outline:
The Life of Pascal
Major Discovery
How Pascal's Discoveries are Used Today

From the Paper:

"Despite the modernity, even humor, inherent in such moral calculations, Pascal was largely a man of his time, and a devout Christian. Blaise Pascal was born during the 17th century at Clermont on June 19, 1623, and died in Paris on August 19, 1662. Although the Frenchman's early education was confined to modern languages, when his father noted that the boy had unusual mathematical aptitude in geometry (Pascal intuited as a child why the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles), his father gave his son a copy of Euclid's Elements. It would not be an understatement to call the young Pascal a prodigy. At the age of fourteen Pascal was admitted to the weekly meetings of French geometricians, at sixteen he wrote an essay on conic sections and at the age of eighteen, he constructed the first arithmetical machine, a kind of prototypical adding machine or calculator (Ball 1908)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Ball, Rouse. "Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662)." From A Short Account of the History ofMathematics. 4th edition, 1908. Excerpt available on 7 Apr 2008 at http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Pascal/RouseBall/RB_Pascal.html
• "Blaise Pascal." Island of Freedom. 7 Apr 008.http://www.island-of-freedom.com/PASCAL.HTM
• "Blaise Pascal." Oregon State University. 7 Apr 008.http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/pascal.html
• Hajek, Alan. "Pascal's Wager." The Stanford Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. FirstPublished Sat May 2, 1998; substantive revision Tue Feb 17, 2004. 8 Apr 2008. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/#4
• "Jansenism." About.com. 7 Apr 2008. http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/western/bldef_jansenism.htm

More papers on Blaise Pascal:

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