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The young Pascal showed an extraordinary intellectual ability, with an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science. [15] Etienne had tried to keep his son from learning mathematics; but by the age of 12, Pascal had rediscovered, on his own, using charcoal on a tile floor, Euclid ’s first thirty-two geometric propositions, and was thus given ...
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 .
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]
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 ]
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.
Pascal’s conversion experience, with its distinctly Mosaic overtones, would eventually lead him to show that Christianity’s firmest foundation is the sanctity of Judaism, both past and present.
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.
Pascal, who never remarried, decided to home-educate his children, who showed extraordinary intellectual ability, particularly his son Blaise. Pascal served on a scientific committee (whose members included Pierre Hérigone and Claude Mydorge) to determine whether Jean-Baptiste Morin's scheme for determining longitude from the Moon's motion was ...