PASCAL

Pascal, born on June 19, 1623, in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The beginning of Pascal’s education was geared toward languages, especially Latin and Greek.The fact that mathematics was a forbidden topic made the subject even more interesting to the inquisitive boy, who at the age of 12 began exploring geometry on his own. He made up his own terminology, not having learned official mathematical terms, and quickly managed to work out that the sum of a triangle’s angles is equal to two right angles.  1642, inspired by the idea of making his father’s job of calculating taxes easier, Pascal Pascal started work on a calculator dubbed the Pascaline. The Pascaline was a numerical wheel calculator with movable dials, each representing a numerical digit. Pascal continued to work on improving the device, with 50 prototypes produced by 1652, but the Pascaline was never a big seller. At the end of the 1640s, Pascal temporarily focused his experiments on the physical sciences.Pascal experimented with how atmospheric pressure could be estimated in terms of weight. In 1648, by having his brother-in-law take readings of the barometric pressure at various altitudes on a mountain (Pascal was too poor of health to make the trek himself), he validated Torricelli’s theory concerning the cause of barometrical variations. Pascal died of a malignant stomach tumor in Paris on August 19, 1662. He was 39 years old. Pascal’s inventions and discoveries have been instrumental to developments in the fields of geometry, physics and computer science, influencing 17th-century visionaries like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Isaac Newton.