BLAISE
PASCAL
Born : June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Nationality : French
Religion : Ronal Catholic
Era : 17th Century Philosophy
School : Jansenism Proto-Existentialism
Main Interest :
Theology, Physics, Mathematics
Notable Ideas :
Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s Triangle
Pascal’s Law
Pascal’s Theorem
Died :
August 19, 1662, Paris, France
INTRODUCTION
Blaise Pascal was
a French physicist,
inventor, mathematician, writer and
philosopher. He
was a child
prodigy who
was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen.
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. Pascal also
wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In
1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating
machines. After three years of effort
and fifty prototypes, he built 20 finished machines over the following ten
years, establishing
him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical
calculator.
Pascal
had poor health, especially after his 18th year, and his death came
just two months after his 39th birthday.
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, which is
in France's Auvergne region. He lost his
mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three.
His father, Étienne Pascal who also had an interest in science and
mathematics, was a local judge and member of the "Noblesse de Robe".
Pascal had two sisters, the younger Jacqueline and the elder Gilberte.
In 1631, five years after the death of his
wife Étienne Pascal moved with his children to Paris. The newly arrived family soon hired Louise
Delfault, a maid who eventually became an instrumental member of the family. Étienne, who never remarried, decided that he
alone would educate his children, for they all showed extraordinary
intellectual ability, particularly his son Blaise. The young Pascal showed an amazing aptitude
for mathematics and science.
Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work
of Desargues on conic sections. Following
Desargues' thinking, the 16-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a
short treatise on what was called the "Mystic Hexagram", Essai pour
les coniques ("Essay on Conics") and sent it first serious work of
mathematics to Père Mersenne in Paris; it is known still today as Pascal's
theorem. It states that if a hexagon is
inscribed in a circle, then the three intersection points of opposite side lie
on a line (called the Pascal line).
Pascal's work was so precocious that
Descartes was convinced that Pascal's father had written it. When assured by
Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son and not the father,
Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: "I
do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics more
appropriate than those of the ancients," adding, "but other matters
related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a
16-year-old child."
In 1642, in an effort to ease his father's
endless, exhausting calculations, and recalculations, of taxes owed and paid. Pascal, not yet 19, constructed a mechanical
calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal's calculator or
the Pascaline. Of the eight Pascalines
known to have survived, four are held by the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris
and one more by the Zwinger museum in Dresden, Germany, exhibit two of his
original mechanical calculators. Pascal
continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade, and he
refers to some 50 machines that were built to his design.
Pascal continued to influence mathematics
throughout his life. In 1653 he
described a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients, now
called Pascal's triangle. He defines the
numbers in the triangle by recursion: Call the number in the (m + 1)th
row and (n + 1)th column tmn.
Then tmn = tm–1,n + tm,n–1,
for m = 0, 1, 2, ... and n = 0, 1, 2, ... The boundary conditions are tm,−1
= 0, t−1,n = 0 for m = 1, 2, 3, ... and n = 1, 2, 3, ... The
generator t00 = 1. Pascal concludes with the proof.
tmn = (m+n) (m+n-1)…..
(m+1)/n(n-1)…..1
After a religious experience in 1654, Pascal
mostly gave up work in mathematics.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
Pascal's work in the fields of the study of
hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press and
the syringe. He proved that hydrostatic
pressure depends not on the weight of the fluid but on the elevation
difference. He demonstrated this
principle by attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of water and filling the
tube with water up to the level of the third floor of a building. This caused the barrel to leak, in what became
known as Pascal's barrel experiment.
By 1646, Pascal had learned of Evangelista
Torricelli's experimentation with barometers. Having replicated an experiment
that involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl of
mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in the tube and what
filled the space above the mercury in the tube. At the time, most scientists
contended that, rather than a vacuum, some invisible matter was present. This
was based on the Aristotelian notion that creation was a thing of substance,
whether visible or invisible; and that this substance was forever in motion.
Furthermore, "Everything that is in motion must be moved by
something,"Aristotle declared. Therefore, to the Aristotelian trained
scientists of Pascal's time, a vacuum was an impossibility. How so? As proof it
was pointed out:
·
Light
passed through the so-called "vacuum" in the glass tube.
·
Aristotle
wrote how everything moved, and must be moved by something.
·
Therefore,
since there had to be an invisible "something" to move the light
through the glass tube, there was no vacuum in the tube. Not in the glass tube
or anywhere else. Vacuums – the absence of any and everything – were simply an
impossibility.
PASCAL’S DEATH
In 1662, Pascal's illness became more
violent, and his emotional condition had severely worsened since his sister's
death. Aware that his health was fading
quickly, he sought a move to the hospital for incurable diseases, but his
doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried. In Paris on 18 August 1662, Pascal went into
convulsions and received extreme unction.
He died the next morning, his last words being "May God never
abandon me," and was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.
LEGACY
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 and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and
Pascal's wager still bear his name.
WORKS
·
Experiences
nouvelles touchant le vide (1647)
·
Traité
du triangle arithmétique [Treatise on the arithmetic triangle] (1653)
·
Lettres
provinciales [The provincial letters] (1656–57)
·
De
l'Esprit géométrique [On the geometrical spirit] (1657 or 1658)
·
Écrit
sur la signature du formulaire (1661)
·
Pensées
[Thoughts] (incomplete at death)
REFERENCE
www.wikipedia.org.in
