Blaise Pascal was a prominent French scientist who made significant contributions to several areas of human thought: literature, philosophy, physics, mathematics, mechanics.He was, among other things, the honor of creating the theory of projective geometry and probability, mathematical analysis, and a number of philosophical works.
Blaise Pascal: Biography
future scientist was born in the family of the chairman of the financial and Court of Justice in June 1623.Already in the early years Blaise Pascal showed interest and talent for research.The first treatise on Euclidean geometry came from his pen when the boy was only 16 years old.And in the 19 years he designed his first version of the computing mechanism.By the way, it's his passion later gave Europe an even more advanced computers.Today, Blaise Pascal is considered to be the founder of cybernetics, and one of the most important scientists of the world's history, along with Newton, Descartes and Planck.However, the list of his achievements is quite broad.In 1634, Evangelista Torricelli, on behalf of his teacher Galileo Galilei, the famous experiment by the world's first discovered the phenomenon of atmospheric pressure.However, the results were not immediately and not fully accepted by science.Torricelli used a glass tube which was evacuated and is immersed in the open end of the vessel with water.Under the pressure of the air water "run away" in the tube where the vacuum was not.Blaise Pascal was the one who first fully realized the importance of the experiment, the existence of atmospheric pressure and differences at different altitudes above sea level (because the air is becoming more sparse).The period of life of a scientist from 1652 to 1654 the biographers called secular.An interesting detail of his biography is the case when one asked him a question about gambling and options for bone loss or cards.It's so interested in the philosophy that the topic has been started in the scientific revolution.Together with another famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat, a scientist laid the foundation for the theory of probability.In the same period of his life he was created by the famous Pascal's triangle and the related concept of combinatorics.
Blaise Pascal: philosophy
Along with an inquisitive mind to comprehend the surrounding physical world, thinker and had a well-backed ideological position.His biographers distinguish two periods in life when Pascal turned to religion.However, this did not mean for his removal from the rationalistic approach to the world.In 1645-1658 years of the great Frenchman was at the center of theological struggle of two trends: the Jesuits and yansenitov.The result was his work, known today as the "Provincial Letters", where Pascal took the side of the latter, criticizing Jesuit dogmatic theology from the standpoint of rationalism.In addition to presenting the philosophical views of the scientist, this work is valuable also from a literary point of view.At the end of the 1650s the scientist health deteriorated sharply.The last years of his life researcher experienced severe headaches and a sharp weakening of the total.Despite this, it is almost to the last days of life to realize themselves as the inventor.So, he originated the idea of the first public transport - the omnibus, which was launched in Paris in the spring of 1662, just six months before the death of Pascal.
