You must have heard of the Pascal triangle, how two numbers above add up to the number below and etcetera etcetera, but do you know the person behind the triangle? Who invented the Pascal triangle? Who turned a calculating machine that only existed in dreams into reality? In this report, we will be investigating, not only about what he invented, but he himself as well. He is Blaise Pascal.
Our team had decided to research on a Mathematician, because we believe that there is an inspiring yet neglected story behind every great figure. We specifically chose Pascal because of his well known invention: the Pascal Triangle - many people know a lot about it, but they do not know about Pascal himself.
In this report, we aim to dig deeper into Pascal, to learn more about his short yet remarkable life and what he has contributed to mankind. Covering a detailed introduction to Blaise Pascal’s family, education, religious beliefs, and a few briefer investigations into the Pascal Triangle and the Pascaline, this report guarantees to grant you some special knowledge about the father of the triangle.
Blaise Pascal
[Mathematician], Physicist, Inventor, Writer, Christian Philosopher*
[Born]: 19th June 1623
[Died]: 19th August 1662 (at the age of 39)
[Family]: Blaise’s mother, Antionette Pascal, passed away in 1626 when Blaise was only three years old. He was the only son and was extremely close to his two older sisters, Gilberte and Jacqueline. Blaise’s father, Etienne Pascal who died in 1651, was exceptionally good at Maths.
[Where he lived]: Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, where his father worked as the President of the Court of Aids, which was one of the highest courts in France during the 15th to 18th century...
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... http://ptri1.tripod.com/ http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kazimir/history.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jansenism http://mathforum.org/mathimages/imgUpload/Pascals-triangle-powers-11.gif http://www.cut-the-knot.org/arithmetic/combinatorics/PascalTriangleProperties.shtml http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Blaise_pascal.jpg http://www.mathsisfun.com/pascals-triangle.html http://www.tradingfives.com/articles/pinball5.jpg http://www.educalc.net/196488.page http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Pascal.html http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ni-Pe/Pascal-Blaise.html http://inventors.about.com/od/frenchinventors/a/Biography-Of-Blaise-Pascal.htm http://www.patient.co.uk/health/dyspepsia-indigestion http://math.berkeley.edu/~robin/Pascal/ http://www.biography.com/people/blaise-pascal-9434176 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus
René Descartes was a French philosopher born in La Haye, France, on March 31, 1596. In the 17th century. Now that town is now named after him, because of the great things he has done. He spent most of his life in the Dutch Republic He had two siblings and was the youngest. His father and mother's name were Joachim and Jeanne Brochard. His mother died before his first birthday. In addition, his father was in the provincial parliament as a council member. After their mother died, Joachim had the kids go live with their grandmother on their mom's side. They stayed there even though their father eventually remarried. Even though their father did not want them around, he still wanted the best education for his children so he sent René when he was eight, to boarding school to the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche. And he stayed there until he was 15.
Blaise Pascal was born on 19 June 1623 in Clermont Ferrand. He was a French mathematician, physicists, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy that was educated by his father. After a horrific accident, Pascal’s father was homebound. He and his sister were taken care of by a group called Jansenists and later converted to Jansenism. Later in 1650, the great philosopher decided to abandon his favorite pursuits of study religion. In one of his Pensees he referred to the abandonment as “contemplate the greatness and the misery of man”.
Jean-Paul Sartre was born on June 21, 1905, and lost his father a little over a year later. His mother, Anne-Marie was raised uneducated in an educated family and moved back in with her own father, the teacher Karl Schweitzer, uncle of the famous philosopher and missionary, Albert Schweitzer. She promptly lost control of her infant son. Jean-Paul became the immediate favorite of his g...
The “Blaise Pascaline,” as referred to in [3] would be considered today as an early version of a calculator. This project derived in part from helping out his father who had been promoted as a tax clerk, a job which required him to perform long calculations at work. Only one other mechanical device was known to add up figures before the Pascaline and that was known as the Schickard's calculating clock, created by German professor Wilhelm Schickard. Unlike Schickard device, Pascal’s calculator had a larger number of production and use despite the somewhat unreliability of the device. The device consisted of a wheel with eight movable parts for dialing and each part corresponding to a particular digit in a number. It worked by using gears and pins to add integers; addends were entered by hand and carriers from one column to the next were broadcast internally by falling weights lifted and dropped by the pins attached to the gears. It could even be manipulated to subtract, multiply and divide if one knew their way around the Pascaline. Subtraction was done by adding the nines complement version of the number being subtracted. Multiplication; accomplished by repeating additions and division performed by repeating subtractions. Balise Pascals went on to inspire directly inspired further work on calculating machines by other inventors such as Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel
Montaigne was born into a very wealthy family on February 28, 1533 in the town of Saint Michel de Montaigne. Soon after birth, his father sent him to a small cottage to live the first 3 years of his life with a peasant family in order to “draw the boy close to the people”. After these years, Montaigne was sent back to his family estate and was taught Latin as his first language. Later in his
Blaise Pascal was born on June 19, 1623. Pascal was a mathematician along with a Christian philosopher who wrote the Pensees which included his work called Pascal’s wager. The crucial outline of this wagers was that it cannot be proved or disprove that God does exists. There are four main parts to the wager that include his reasoning to that statement. It has been acknowledged that Pascal makes it clear that he is referring to the Christian God in his wager. This is the Christian God that promises his people will be rewarded with eternal life along with infinite bliss.
Blaise Pascal has contributed to the field of mathematics in countless ways imaginable. His focal contribution to mathematics is the Pascal Triangle. Made to show binomial coefficients, it was probably found by mathematicians in Greece and India but they never received the credit. To build the triangle you put a 1 at the top and then continue placing numbers below it in a triangular pattern. Each number is the two numbers above it added together (except for the numbers on the edges which are all ‘1’). There are patterns within the triangle such as odds and evens, horizontal sums, exponents of 11, squares, Fibonacci sequence, and the triangle is symmetrical. The many uses of Pascal’s triangles range from probability (heads and tails), combinations, and there is a formula for working out any missing value in the Pascal Triangle: . It can also be used to find coefficients in binomial expressions (put citation). Another staple of Pascal’s contributions to projective geometry is a proof called Pascal’s theore...
Leonhard Euler was easily the best mathematician of the eighteenth century. His contributions to mathematics ranges from common notation to proving the hypothesis of Newton and Leibnitz. His discoveries cannot be limited to just one field of interest, nor just the field of mathematics. He made great strides in geometry, infinitesimal calculus, trigonometry, algebra, and number theory, as well as continuum physics, lunar theory and other areas of physics. He is also one of the most well written mathematicians whose works could be contained in 60–80 quarto volumes. Probably the most extraordinary fact about him is that the majority of the work he did was in the last twenty years of his life, when he was completely blind. Euler is arguably one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived.
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The Bernoulli family had eight significant and important mathematicians, starting with Jacob Bernoulli, born in 1654. Though there was a great deal of hatred and jealousy between the Bernuollis, they made many remarkable contributions in mathematics and science and helped progress mathematics to become what it is today. For example, Daniel discovered a way to measure blood pressure that was used for 170 years, which advanced the medical field. Daniel’s way of measuring pressure is still used today to measure the air speed of a plane. Without the Bernoulli family’s contributions and advancements to calculus, probability, and other areas of mathematics and science, mathematics would not be where it is now.
Fibonacci was born in approximately 1175 AD with the birth name of Leonardo in Pisa, Italy. During his life he went by many names, but Leonardo was the one constant. Very little is known of his early life, and what is known is only found through his works. Leonardo’s history begins with his father’s reassignment to North Africa, and that is where Fibonacci’s mathematical journey begins. His father, Guilielmo, was an Italian man who worked as a secretary for the Republic of Pisa. When reassigned to Algeria in about 1192, he took his son Leonardo with him. This is where Leonardo first learned of arithmetic, and was interested in the “Hindu-Arabic” numerical style (St. Andrews, Biography). In 1200 Leonardo ended his travels around the Mediterranean and returned to Pisa. Two years later he published his first book. Liber Abaci, meaning “The Book of Calculations”.
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René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, France, which has been renamed after him, Descartes. He was the baby out of his three siblings. His mom named Jeanne Brochard had died before he turned one year old. His father, Joachim Brochard, a council member in the provincial parliament, sent his kids to live with their grandmother. The father left them with the grandmother while he himself remarried and enjoyed the bliss of not having children under his feet. He still was a stickler for a good education and having a legacy so he sent 8 year old Rene to the Jesuit college of Henri IV where he stayed until he was 15.
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"programming" rules that the user must memorize, all ordinary arithmetic operations can be performed (Soma, 14). The next innovation in computers took place in 1694 when Blaise Pascal invented the first “digital calculating machine”. It could only add numbers and they had to be entered by turning dials. It was designed to help Pascal’s father who