Blaise Pascal Research Paper

Blaise Pascal was born on June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. He was the third child and only son to Etienne and Antoinette Pascal. His mother passed away when he was just three years old. Since Etienne Pascal had unorthodox views, he decided to teach his son himself. Pascal did not study mathematics before he was fifteen years old, but when he was twelve he secretly started to work on geometry. He discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle are two right angles. Then his father figured out and gave Blaise a copy of Euclid. Then when Pascal turned fourteen years old, he started to attend the Mersennes meetings with his father. It was there, at age sixteen, that Blaise presented a number of his early theorems, including his "mystical

Pascal was 18 years old and he invented the first digital calculator. He worked on it for three years between 1642 and 1645. He was inspired by the idea of making his father's job of calculating taxes easier. The calculator was named Pascaline. In the year 1646, his dad's leg was injured and he was taken care of by two religious people. They had a big affect on Pascal, and he became a religious man. Then later in the year 1648, Pascal observed that the pressure of the atmosphere decreases with height and deduced that a vacuum existed above the atmosphere. Pascal then published a challenge giving two prizes to the solutions to the problems of Wren, Laloubère, Leibniz, Huygens, Wallis, Fermat and a couple of other mathematicians. Wallis and Laloubère entered the competition, but Laloubère's solution was wrong and Wallis was unsuccessful. Sluze, Ricci, Huygens, Wren and Fermat all showed their discoveries to Pascal without entering the competition. Wren worked on Pascal's challenge and challenged Pascal. Pascal published his own solutions in the Letters to Carcavi. After that, he spent his last years giving to the poor and going from church to church in Paris attending one religious service after