Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was born on June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France and died August 19, 1662 of stomach cancer. Pascal was not only a great mathematician, he was also a man of great knowledge. Philosopher, mathematician, inventor, and scientific genius are just a few of the things he became in his life. Pascal helped create many things for this world as a whole, like when he invented the barometer, the hydraulic press, and of course (my personal favorite) the syringe. To the mathematical world he was a god, and he is most well known for creating “Pascal’s Triangle” and the adding machine, otherwise known as a calculator (then it was called the “Pascaline.”)
As a boy Pascal took his free time to study mathematics, specifically geometry. He was intrigued by the fact that so many things could be quite possibly perfect and so precise. He immediately began drawing his own conclusions in the world of geometrics. That was when he began to discover things such as “Pascal’s triangle,” which everyone who took high school mathematics, specifically geometry, should recognize. He wrote papers on his theories of conic sections, which are defined in Algebra two, used in a higher sense of mathematics and geometry as well. He even published discoveries on his thoughts of vaccums. Vaccums were a crazy man’s playland back in the day.
The barometer, the triangle, conics, vaccum theories and the adding machine were all very big discoveries. The barometer, which we are all fa...
Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th century American poet, author, and critic. Poe is often described as a rebel against society and art-for-art's sake supporter who experimented in making his poems without didacticism and devoid of any meaning, but he is also respected as a genius in terms of his commitment to art and his ability to experiment with various forms of expressions (Fromm 304). In my opinion, Poe was not a rebel because he remained true to himself. Although he was influenced by traditional artists, he adapted this tradition to his personal being. Although he might have been perceived as a rebel against society because of his innovative views on the world, human beings, and poetry, I believe his work remains popular and influential today because he remained true to his style and personality. However, I agree that he was dedicated to art for art's sake because his main intention was to express himself through his work. Poe did not bother with popular styles and techniques, but he was a master poet when it comes to adapting to different styles to convey his emotions appropriately. Overall, Poe's poetry displays sentimentalism because he puts all emphasis on emotions and no emphasis on logic, but it is not limited to optimism because he displays both positive and negative emotions, and he displays them often together using both extremes in a single poem.
Geometry, a cornerstone in modern civilization, also had its beginnings in Ancient Greece. Euclid, a mathematician, formed many geometric proofs and theories [Document 5]. He also came to one of the most significant discoveries of math, Pi. This number showed the ratio between the diameter and circumference of a circle.
"Lord help my poor soul."(Neurotic Poets)The departing words of the 40-year-old American author, Edgar Allan Poe, on Sunday October 7, 1849. In Massachusetts on the 19th day of January in the year 1809, Edgar Poe was born to actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and actor David Poe Junior, making him an older brother to Rosalie Poe, and a younger one to William Henry Leonard Poe. Poe may, perchance, have been named after a character in the play that his parents were performing that year. He was never formally adopted, however, Edgar Poe was renamed Edgar Allan Poe when the John Allan family took him in after his mother deceased and his father forsook the family. The purpose of this paper is to examine the disheartening life of such an amazing poet, critic, editor and author and show how influential his success even after death can inspire us to try our hardest despite the circumstances.
Galileo Galilei is a famous inventor, Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher. As a mathematician he said, " Mathematics is the language in which God had written the universe." (Quotationspage.com). Galileo was a known mathematician. All his accomplishments had to start somewhere. He was born in Pisa, Italy and was the first of the six brother and sisters. Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei is his full name. Galileo invented many inventions such as the first tank, a helicopter, and even improved the existing telescope. Galilei had many contributions to science as well. He observed discovered sunspots but later was blinded by looking at the sun too much. Galileo's top accomplishment which every one knows him by is his discoveries of the telescope; Earth revolution around the sun, Sunspots, and Venus phases.
It is said that when history looks upon the life of an individual when their time has passed; it is not the dates on the tombstone that define the man but the dash in between. Such was the case in the life of theologian, philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal. Pascal was born on the 19th of June 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand France and died at the age of 39 of tuberculosis on the 19th August 1662 in Paris, but the bulk of his career, his success and life achievement began in his early years. As a young boy, Pascal’s lost his mother and soon afterward his father moved the family, Blaise and his two sisters to Paris. Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal was a mathematician himself and taught Pascal Latin and Greek, which at the time was considered
Euclid, who lived from about 330 B.C.E. to 260 B.C.E., is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. Very little is known about his life or exact place of birth, other than the fact that he taught mathematics at the Alexandria library in Alexandria, Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy I. He also wrote many books based on mathematical knowledge, such as Elements, which is regarded as one of the greatest mathematical/geometrical encyclopedias of all time, only being outsold by the Bible.
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...
... Pascal was such a brilliant man because he could do both of these. Pascal was one of the only men that wrote about his beliefs in God and was an accredited scientist and mathematician too. He was a true man of the scientific revolution.
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.
Blaise Pascal lived during a time when religion and science were clashing and challenging previous discoveries and ideas. Pascal lived from 1623 to 1662 due to his untimely death at the age of thirty nine. The scientific community grew enormously and Pascal was a great contributor to this growth. The growth in the scientific community is known as the Scientific Revolution. He lived in a time where an absolute monarch came into power, King Louis the XIV. Louis XIV was a believer in “one king, one law, and one faith” (Spielvogel, 2012). Pascal saw the destruction of protestant practices in France and the growth and acceptance of scientific discoveries. He used the scientific method to refine previous experiments that were thought to be logical but Pascal proved otherwise and eventually led to Pascal’s Law. He spent his life devoted to two loves: God and science. Within his book, “Pensees,” Pascal argues and shares his thoughts about God, science, and philosophy.
The Scientific Revolution was sparked through Nicolaus Copernicusí unique use of mathematics. His methods developed from Greek astr...
The barometer is a device for measuring the total pressure of the atmosphere. A primitive barometer can easily be constructed by taking a glass tube about a meter long, sealing one end, filling the tube completely with mercury, placing your thumb firmly over the open end, and carefully inverting the tube into an open dish filled with mercury. The mercury will fall to a height independent of the diameter of the tube and a vacuum will be created above it.
Between 1850 and 1900, the mathematics and physics fields began advancing. The advancements involved extremely arduous calculations and formulas that took a great deal of time when done manually.
It was a warm spring day (well I would assume that it would have been a warm spring day) when Leonhard Euler graced the world with his presence. April 15, 1707, marked the day that a brilliant mathematician entered into the world. It would become apparent in his early childhood that Euler had a knack for mathematics. Although his abilities could be considered genetic as his father, Paul Euler, was a brilliant mathematician himself who studied under Jakob Bernoulli.
The 17th Century saw Napier, Briggs and others greatly extend the power of mathematics as a calculator science with his discovery of logarithms. Cavalieri made progress towards the calculus with his infinitesimal methods and Descartes added the power of algebraic methods to geometry. Euclid, who lived around 300 BC in Alexandria, first stated his five postulates in his book The Elements that forms the base for all of his later Abu Abd-Allah ibn Musa al’Khwarizmi, was born abo...