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Blaise Pascal [a] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer. Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen .
Second edition of Blaise Pascal's Pensées, 1670. The Pensées (Thoughts) is a collection of fragments written by the French 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Pascal's religious conversion led him into a life of asceticism, and the Pensées was in many ways his life's work. [1]
Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument advanced by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), seventeenth-century French mathematician, philosopher, physicist, and theologian. [1] This argument posits that individuals essentially engage in a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God .
This year’s Thanksgiving Day—November 23—was not only our national day of remembrance but a significant religious anniversary: 369 years to the day since Blaise Pascal’s “Night of Fire.”
The problem of points, also called the problem of division of the stakes, is a classical problem in probability theory.One of the famous problems that motivated the beginnings of modern probability theory in the 17th century, it led Blaise Pascal to the first explicit reasoning about what today is known as an expected value.
In the letters, Pascal's tone combines the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world. Their style meant that, quite apart from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Adding to that popularity was Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and satire in his arguments.
Pascaline (also known as the arithmetic machine or Pascal's calculator) is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's work as the supervisor of taxes in Rouen , France. [ 2 ]
An illustration of Pascal's barrel experiment from The forces of nature by Amédée Guillemin (1872) Pascal's barrel is the name of a hydrostatics experiment allegedly performed by Blaise Pascal in 1646. [9] In the experiment, Pascal supposedly inserted a long vertical tube into an (otherwise sealed) barrel filled with water.