Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (/pæˈskæl, pɑːˈskɑːl/;French: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian 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 (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following ten years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.

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. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646, he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.

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Pascal's Pensées

Famous quotes by Blaise Pascal:

"Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just."
"The heart has reasons that reason cannot know."
"Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true."
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed"
"There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus"
"You always admire what you really don't understand."
"Imagination decides everything"
"All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone."
"Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it."
"In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't."
"One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better."
"Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?"
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Attention, please! We are losing the liberty of controlling our own minds. And education must be restructured to meet this challenge ... Indeed, this could be seen as the central task of education ... He invokes the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal ... J ... .
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