Blaise Pascal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Blaise Pascal

Painting of Blaise Pascal made by Franois II Quesnel

for Grard Edelinck in 1691.
19 June 1623
Born
Clermont-Ferrand,
Auvergne, France
19 August 1662 (aged 39)
Died
Paris, France
Residence
France
Nationality French
Religion
Roman Catholic
Era
Region

17th-century philosophy
Western philosophy

Jansenism

Proto-existentialism

Theology

School

Main interests

Notable ideas

Mathematics

Philosophy

Physics

Pascal's Wager

Pascal's triangle

Pascal's law

Pascal's theorem

Influences[show]
Influenced[show]
Blaise Pascal (/pskl, pskl/;[1] French: [blz 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 generalising the work of Evangelista
Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After
three years of effort and 50 prototypes,[2] he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's
calculators and later Pascalines) over the following 10 years,[3] establishing him as one of the first
two inventors of the mechanical calculator.[4][5]
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 Galilei and Torricelli, in 1646, he
rebutted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused
many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism
known by its detractors as Jansenism.[6] His father died in 1651. Following a religious experience
in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology. His two most
famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales and the Penses, the former set in
the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. In that year, he also wrote an important treatise on
the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in
calculating the volume of solids.

Pascal had poor health, especially after the age of 18, and he died just two months after his 39th
birthday.[7]

Contents

1 Early life and education

2 Contributions to mathematics
o 2.1 Philosophy of mathematics

3 Contributions to the physical sciences

4 Adult life, religion, philosophy, and literature

o 4.1 Religious conversion
o 4.2 Brush with death
o 4.3 The Provincial Letters
o 4.4 The Penses
o 4.5 Last works and death

5 Legacy

6 Works

7 See also

8 References

9 Further reading

10 External links

Early life and education

Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand, which is in France's Auvergne region. He lost his mother,
Antoinette Begon, at the age of three.[8] His father, tienne Pascal (15881651), who also had an
interest in science and mathematics, was a local judge and member of the "Noblesse de Robe".
Pascal had two sisters, the younger Jacqueline and the elder Gilberte.

In 1631, five years after the death of his wife,[9] tienne Pascal moved with his children to Paris.
The newly arrived family soon hired Louise Delfault, a maid who eventually became an
instrumental member of the family. tienne, who never remarried, decided that he alone would
educate his children, for they all showed extraordinary intellectual ability, particularly his son
Blaise. The young Pascal showed an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science.
Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work of Desargues on conic sections. Following
Desargues' thinking, the 16-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a short treatise on
what was called the "Mystic Hexagram", Essai pour les coniques ("Essay on Conics") and sent it
his first serious work of mathematicsto Pre Mersenne in Paris; it is known still today as
Pascal's theorem. It states that if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle (or conic) then the three
intersection points of opposite sides lie on a line (called the Pascal line).
Pascal's work was so precocious that Descartes was convinced that Pascal's father had written it.
When assured by Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son and not the father,
Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: "I do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations
about conics more appropriate than those of the ancients," adding, "but other matters related to
this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a 16-year-old child."[10]
In France at that time offices and positions could beand werebought and sold. In 1631
tienne sold his position as second president of the Cour des Aides for 65,665 livres.[11] The
money was invested in a government bond which provided, if not a lavish, then certainly a
comfortable income which allowed the Pascal family to move to, and enjoy, Paris. But in 1638
Richelieu, desperate for money to carry on the Thirty Years' War, defaulted on the government's
bonds. Suddenly tienne Pascal's worth had dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than
7,300.

An early Pascaline on display at the Muse des Arts et Mtiers, Paris

Like so many others, tienne was eventually forced to flee Paris because of his opposition to the
fiscal policies of Cardinal Richelieu, leaving his three children in the care of his neighbour
Madame Sainctot, a great beauty with an infamous past who kept one of the most glittering and
intellectual salons in all France. It was only when Jacqueline performed well in a children's play
with Richelieu in attendance that tienne was pardoned. In time, tienne was back in good
graces with the cardinal and in 1639 had been appointed the king's commissioner of taxes in the
city of Rouena city whose tax records, thanks to uprisings, were in utter chaos.
In 1642, in an effort to ease his father's endless, exhausting calculations, and recalculations, of
taxes owed and paid (into which work the young Pascal had been recruited), Pascal, not yet 19,
constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal's

calculator or the Pascaline. Of the eight Pascalines known to have survived, four are held by the
Muse des Arts et Mtiers in Paris and one more by the Zwinger museum in Dresden, Germany,
exhibit two of his original mechanical calculators.[12] Though these machines are pioneering
forerunners to a further 400 years of development of mechanical methods of calculation, and in a
sense to the later field of computer engineering, the calculator failed to be a great commercial
success. Partly because it was still quite cumbersome to use in practice, but probably primarily
because it was extraordinarily expensive, the Pascaline became little more than a toy, and a status
symbol, for the very rich both in France and elsewhere in Europe. Pascal continued to make
improvements to his design through the next decade, and he refers to some 50 machines that
were built to his design.

Contributions to mathematics

Pascal's triangle. Each number is the sum of the two directly above it. The triangle demonstrates
many mathematical properties in addition to showing binomial coefficients.
Pascal continued to influence mathematics throughout his life. His Trait du triangle
arithmtique ("Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle") of 1653 described a convenient tabular
presentation for binomial coefficients, now called Pascal's triangle. The triangle can also be
represented:
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6

1
1
1
1
1
1
1

1
1
2
3
4
5
6

2
1
3
6
10
15

3
1
4
10
20

4
1
5
15

5
1
6

6
1

He defines the numbers in the triangle by recursion: Call the number in the (m + 1)th row and
(n + 1)th column tmn. Then tmn = tm1,n + tm,n1, for m = 0, 1, 2, ... and n = 0, 1, 2, ... The boundary
conditions are tm,1 = 0, t1,n = 0 for m = 1, 2, 3, ... and n = 1, 2, 3, ... The generator t00 = 1. Pascal
concludes with the proof,

In 1654 he proved Pascal's identity relating the sums of the p-th powers of the first n positive
integers for p = 0, 1, 2, , k.[13]
In 1654, prompted by his friend the Chevalier de Mr, he corresponded with Pierre de Fermat
on the subject of gambling problems, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical
theory of probabilities.[14] The specific problem was that of two players who want to finish a
game early and, given the current circumstances of the game, want to divide the stakes fairly,
based on the chance each has of winning the game from that point. From this discussion, the
notion of expected value was introduced. Pascal later (in the Penses) used a probabilistic
argument, Pascal's Wager, to justify belief in God and a virtuous life. The work done by Fermat
and Pascal into the calculus of probabilities laid important groundwork for Leibniz' formulation
of the calculus.[15]
After a religious experience in 1654, Pascal mostly gave up work in mathematics.

Philosophy of mathematics
Pascal's major contribution to the philosophy of mathematics came with his De l'Esprit
gomtrique ("Of the Geometrical Spirit"), originally written as a preface to a geometry textbook
for one of the famous "Petites-Ecoles de Port-Royal" ("Little Schools of Port-Royal"). The work
was unpublished until over a century after his death. Here, Pascal looked into the issue of
discovering truths, arguing that the ideal of such a method would be to found all propositions on
already established truths. At the same time, however, he claimed this was impossible because
such established truths would require other truths to back them upfirst principles, therefore,
cannot be reached. Based on this, Pascal argued that the procedure used in geometry was as
perfect as possible, with certain principles assumed and other propositions developed from them.
Nevertheless, there was no way to know the assumed principles to be true.
Pascal also used De l'Esprit gomtrique to develop a theory of definition. He distinguished
between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer and definitions which
are within the language and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their
referent. The second type would be characteristic of the philosophy of essentialism. Pascal
claimed that only definitions of the first type were important to science and mathematics, arguing
that those fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism as formulated by Descartes.
In De l'Art de persuader ("On the Art of Persuasion"), Pascal looked deeper into geometry's
axiomatic method, specifically the question of how people come to be convinced of the axioms
upon which later conclusions are based. Pascal agreed with Montaigne that achieving certainty in
these axioms and conclusions through human methods is impossible. He asserted that these
principles can be grasped only through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for
submission to God in searching out truths.

Contributions to the physical sciences

Portrait of Pascal

An illustration of the (apocryphal) Pascal's barrel experiment

Pascal's work in the fields of the study of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the
principles of hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press (using hydraulic
pressure to multiply force) and the syringe. He proved that hydrostatic pressure depends not on
the weight of the fluid but on the elevation difference. He demonstrated this principle by
attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of water and filling the tube with water up to the level of the
third floor of a building. This caused the barrel to leak, in what became known as Pascal's barrel
experiment.

By 1646, Pascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli's experimentation with barometers. Having
replicated an experiment that involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl
of mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in the tube and what filled the
space above the mercury in the tube. At the time, most scientists contended that, rather than a
vacuum, some invisible matter was present. This was based on the Aristotelian notion that
creation was a thing of substance, whether visible or invisible; and that this substance was
forever in motion. Furthermore, "Everything that is in motion must be moved by something,"
Aristotle declared.[16] Therefore, to the Aristotelian trained scientists of Pascal's time, a vacuum
was an impossibility. How so? As proof it was pointed out:

Light passed through the so-called "vacuum" in the glass tube.

Aristotle wrote how everything moved, and must be moved by something.

Therefore, since there had to be an invisible "something" to move the light through the
glass tube, there was no vacuum in the tube. Not in the glass tube or anywhere else.
Vacuums the absence of any and everything were simply an impossibility.

Following more experimentation in this vein, in 1647 Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles
touchant le vide ("New Experiments with the Vacuum"), which detailed basic rules describing to
what degree various liquids could be supported by air pressure. It also provided reasons why it
was indeed a vacuum above the column of liquid in a barometer tube.
On 19 September 1648, after many months of Pascal's friendly but insistent prodding, Florin
Prier, husband of Pascal's elder sister Gilberte, was finally able to carry out the fact-finding
mission vital to Pascal's theory. The account, written by Prier, reads:
The weather was chancy last Saturday...[but] around five o'clock that morning...the Puy-deDme was visible...so I decided to give it a try. Several important people of the city of Clermont
had asked me to let them know when I would make the ascent...I was delighted to have them
with me in this great work...
...at eight o'clock we met in the gardens of the Minim Fathers, which has the lowest elevation in
town....First I poured 16 pounds of quicksilver...into a vessel...then took several glass
tubes...each four feet long and hermetically sealed at one end and opened at the other...then
placed them in the vessel [of quicksilver]...I found the quick silver stood at 26" and 3 lines
above the quicksilver in the vessel...I repeated the experiment two more times while standing in
the same spot...[they] produced the same result each time...
I attached one of the tubes to the vessel and marked the height of the quicksilver and...asked
Father Chastin, one of the Minim Brothers...to watch if any changes should occur through the
day...Taking the other tube and a portion of the quick silver...I walked to the top of Puy-deDme, about 500 fathoms higher than the monastery, where upon experiment...found that the
quicksilver reached a height of only 23" and 2 lines...I repeated the experiment five times with
care...each at different points on the summit...found the same height of quicksilver...in each
case...[17]

Pascal replicated the experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up to the top of the bell tower
at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a height of about 50 metres. The mercury
dropped two lines.
In the face of criticism that some invisible matter must exist in Pascal's empty space, Pascal, in
his reply to Estienne Noel, gave one of the 17th century's major statements on the scientific
method, which is a striking anticipation of the idea popularised by Karl Popper that scientific
theories are characterised by their falsifiability: "In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it
does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary
to a single one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity."[18] His insistence on the
existence of the vacuum also led to conflict with other prominent scientists, including Descartes.
Pascal introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual
motion machine.[19]

Adult life, religion, philosophy, and literature

For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a
central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of
things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is
equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which
he is engulfed.
Blaise Pascal, Penses No. 72

Religious conversion

Pascal studying the cycloid, by Augustin Pajou, 1785, Louvre

In the winter of 1646, Pascal's 58-year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell on an icy
street of Rouen; given the man's age and the state of medicine in the 17th century, a broken hip
could be a very serious condition, perhaps even fatal. Rouen was home to two of the finest

doctors in France: Monsieur Doctor Deslandes and Monsieur Doctor de La Bouteillerie. The
elder Pascal "would not let anyone other than these men attend him...It was a good choice, for
the old man survived and was able to walk again..."[20] But treatment and rehabilitation took three
months, during which time La Bouteillerie and Deslandes had become household guests.
Both men were followers of Jean Guillebert, proponent of a splinter group from Catholic
teaching known as Jansenism. This still fairly small sect was making surprising inroads into the
French Catholic community at that time. It espoused rigorous Augustinism. Blaise spoke with
the doctors frequently, and upon his successful treatment of tienne, borrowed from them works
by Jansenist authors. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort of "first conversion" and began to
write on theological subjects in the course of the following year.
Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what
some biographers have called his "worldly period" (164854). His father died in 1651 and left
his inheritance to Pascal and Jacqueline, for whom Pascal acted as her conservator. Jacqueline
announced that she would soon become a postulant in the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal.
Pascal was deeply affected and very sad, not because of her choice, but because of his chronic
poor health; he too needed her.
Suddenly there was war in the Pascal household. Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but
she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn't work, either. At the heart of this
was...Blaise's fear of abandonment...if Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, she would have to leave
her inheritance behind...[but] nothing would change her mind.[21]
By the end of October in 1651, a truce had been reached between brother and sister. In return for
a healthy annual stipend, Jacqueline signed over her part of the inheritance to her brother.
Gilberte had already been given her inheritance in the form of a dowry. In early January,
Jacqueline left for Port-Royal. On that day, according to Gilberte concerning her brother, "He
retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little
parlor..."[22] In early June 1653, after what must have seemed like endless badgering from
Jacqueline, Pascal formally signed over the whole of his sister's inheritance to Port-Royal,
which, to him, "had begun to smell like a cult."[23] With two thirds of his father's estate now gone,
the 29-year-old Pascal was now consigned to genteel poverty.
For a while, Pascal pursued the life of a bachelor. During visits to his sister at Port-Royal in
1654, he displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not drawn to God.[24]

Brush with death

[dubious discuss]

On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision
and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of
Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded
by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He seems to have carefully sewn
this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a servant

discovered it only by chance after his death.[25] This piece is now known as the Memorial. The
story of the carriage accident[clarification needed] as having led to the experience described in the
Memorial is disputed by some scholars.[26] His belief and religious commitment revitalized,
Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655.
For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point
immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion,
the Provincial Letters.

The Provincial Letters

Main article: Lettres provinciales
French literature
by category

French literary history

Medieval
Renaissance

17th

18th

19th

20th century

Contemporary

French writers

Chronological list
Writers by category

Essayists

Novelists

Playwrights

Poets

Short story writers

Children's writers

Portals

French language

France

Literature

French/Francophone literature

Beginning in 1656, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, a popular ethical method
used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period (especially the Jesuits, and in particular
Antonio Escobar). Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify
moral laxity and all sorts of sins. The 18-letter series was published between 1656 and 1657
under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV. The king ordered that the
book be shredded and burnt in 1660. In 1661, in the midsts of the formulary controversy, the
Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved with the school
had to sign a 1656 papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. The final letter
from Pascal, in 1657, had defied Alexander VII himself. Even Pope Alexander, while publicly
opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments.

Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work.
Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for
public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and JeanJacques Rousseau.
Charles Perrault wrote of the Letters: "Everything is therepurity of language, nobility of
thought, solidity in reasoning, finesse in raillery, and throughout an agrment not to be found
anywhere else."[27]

The Penses
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Penses
Main article: Penses
Pascal's most influential theological work, referred to posthumously as the Penses
("Thoughts"), was not completed before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent
examination and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion
Chrtienne ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). The first version of the numerous scraps of
paper found after his death appeared in print as a book in 1669 titled Penses de M. Pascal sur la
religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other
subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. One of the Apologie's main strategies was to use
the contradictory philosophies of skepticism and stoicism, personalized by Montaigne on one
hand, and Epictetus on the other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion
that he would embrace God.
Pascal's Penses is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in French prose.
When commenting on one particular section (Thought #72), Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest
pages in the French language.[28] Will Durant hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French
prose".[29] In Penses, Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes: infinity and nothing, faith
and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity seemingly arriving at no
definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace. Rolling these into one he develops
Pascal's Wager.

Last works and death

Pascal's epitaph in Saint-tienne-du-Mont, where he was buried

T. S. Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, and
an ascetic among men of the world." Pascal's ascetic lifestyle derived from a belief that it was
natural and necessary for a person to suffer. In 1659, Pascal fell seriously ill. During his last
years, he frequently tried to reject the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Sickness is the
natural state of Christians."[30]
Louis XIV suppressed the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal in 1661. In response, Pascal wrote
one of his final works, crit sur la signature du formulaire ("Writ on the Signing of the Form"),
exhorting the Jansenists not to give in. Later that year, his sister Jacqueline died, which
convinced Pascal to cease his polemics on Jansenism. Pascal's last major achievement, returning
to his mechanical genius, was inaugurating perhaps the first bus line, moving passengers within
Paris in a carriage with many seats.
In 1662, Pascal's illness became more violent, and his emotional condition had severely
worsened since his sister's death. Aware that his health was fading quickly, he sought a move to
the hospital for incurable diseases, but his doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried.
In Paris on 18 August 1662, Pascal went into convulsions and received extreme unction. He died
the next morning, his last words being "May God never abandon me," and was buried in the
cemetery of Saint-tienne-du-Mont.[30]
An autopsy performed after his death revealed grave problems with his stomach and other organs
of his abdomen, along with damage to his brain. Despite the autopsy, the cause of his poor health
was never precisely determined, though speculation focuses on tuberculosis, stomach cancer, or
a combination of the two.[31] The headaches which afflicted Pascal are generally attributed to his
brain lesion.

Legacy

Death mask of Blaise Pascal.

In honour of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of
pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics),
and as mentioned above, Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.
Pascal's development of probability theory was his most influential contribution to mathematics.
Originally applied to gambling, today it is extremely important in economics, especially in
actuarial science. John Ross writes, "Probability theory and the discoveries following it changed
the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, and an individual's and society's ability to
influence the course of future events."[32] However, it should be noted that Pascal and Fermat,
though doing important early work in probability theory, did not develop the field very far.
Christiaan Huygens, learning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote
the first book on the subject. Later figures who continued the development of the theory include
Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace.
In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical
Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit
influenced later polemicists. The content of his literary work is best remembered for its strong
opposition to the rationalism of Ren Descartes and simultaneous assertion that the main
countervailing philosophy, empiricism, was also insufficient for determining major truths.
In France, prestigious annual awards, Blaise Pascal Chairs are given to outstanding international
scientists to conduct their research in the Ile de France region.[33] One of the Universities of
Clermont-Ferrand, France Universit Blaise Pascal is named after him. The University of
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, holds an annual math contest named in his honour.[34]
Pascalian theology has grown out of his perspective that we are, according to Wood, "born into a
duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects and so we find it easy to reject God
continually and deceive ourselves about our own sinfulness".[35]
Roberto Rossellini directed a filmed biopic, Blaise Pascal, which originally aired on Italian
television in 1971.[36] Pascal was a subject of the first edition of the 1984 BBC Two documentary,
Sea of Faith, presented by Don Cupitt.