Ten fun facts about Blaise Pascal
Fact 1
He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen.
Fact 2
Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli.
Fact 3
Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
Fact 4
Pascal's most influential theological work, referred to posthumously as the Pensées ("Thoughts"), was not completed before his death. Pascal's Pensées is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in French prose.
Fact 5
In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics).
Fact 6
Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.
Fact 7
Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics.
Fact 8
After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he invented the mechanical calculator. He built 20 of these machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) in the following ten years.
Fact 9
Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of 16, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.
Fact 10
Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum.
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