Blaise Pascal Research Paper

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A Biography on Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal was born in France in the region of Auvergne in the town of Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. He came from a Catholic family, not surprising since France was known in the Middle Ages as the Eldest Daughter of the Church (Coulumbe, 2012). Religion, like science and math, was very important to Pascal and his family. Indeed, his father had expressed many of the same interests that motivated Blaise—so the apple did not fall far from the tree with respect to the scholarly direction that Blaise’s life took as he grew up. However, his health was never very robust, and Blaise Pascal only lived to be 39. Nonetheless, by the time of his death, he had made important contributions in all three areas of interest—religion, science and math. His most famous works include Pensees and Provincial Letters. Pensees was a philosophical-theological work that examined the disputes between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, a Catholic sect that had emerged in France during the Protestant Reformation and that Pascal identified with to some extent.

Pascal’s mother died when he was very young and his father moved the family to Paris shortly thereafter (Devlin, 2008). Pascal’s father took up the responsibility of educating his children, which is most likely the reason Blaise took after his father’s love of math and science. By the age of 16, Blaise Pascal was already writing proofs—his first being an “Essay on Conics” in line with an argument made by another French thinker Desargues. The essay became known as Pascal’s theorem, and the crux of it is that if a hexagon is inscribed in a conic, the three points of intersection on opposite sides will occur on a line which is known today as the Pascal line. It was a remarkable work by a young 16 year old and bode well for the young French scholar (Devlin, 2008). In fact, the work was full of so much erudition that the philosopher Descartes was certain that it had been the work of Blaise’s father.

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While the head of the household had seemingly made a wise decision by investing in government bonds, the decision ultimately proved unwise when Richelieu defaulted on the bonds in order to scrape together enough money for France to fight in the Thirty Years’ War. Blaise’s father had to leave France—not only because they now had no money but also because Blaise’s father was vocally critical of Richelieu. Eventually, the father won back a position with the government and became a prominent official in Rouen. Pascal tried to help his father in his work as tax commissioner in Rouen and at the age of 19 he developed a mechanical calculating device that could assist in performing addition and subtraction, which today is called the Pascaline or Pascal’s calculator.

Not content to while away his time as an inventor, Pascal went on to apply himself to the study of mathematics and created what is today known as Pascal’s triangle, a tabular representation of binomial coefficients. He became interested in experiments in barometric pressure and wrote “New Experiments with the Vacuum” in order to refute the concept that “nature abhors a vacuum”—as Pascal demonstrated, vacuums could and did exist and the example of this was the fact that different liquids could be held up by air pressure alone.

Pascal also took a great interest in religious, philosophical and theological discussions, as was customary of many men at the time. He was introduced to Jansenism by way of his father’s friends. Jansenists were a strict sect within Catholicism and took up the subject with earnest in his writings though he also pursued other lines of inquiry as well. In 1656, however, Pascal began writing his Provincial Letters, which mainly attacked the idea….....

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