Glance of Blaise Pascal - World of Biography

BLAISE PASCAL [1623 – 1662]

Blaise Pascal, the French scientist was one of the most reputed Mathematician and Physicist of his time. Being a profound thinker, well ahead of his time, he also contributed immensely to the Christian literature.

Today, he is mainly known for his Theory of Probability and Pascal’s Law of Pressure. In later years, living a life of an ascetic, he wrote his famous Provincial Letters and Pensees, the former having gained a considerable acclaim as a classic in satire.

Pascal’s style was marked by originality and bereft of artifice. He impressed his readers presenting logical thoughts and through passionate force of his dialectics. Among contemporaries of Rene Descartes, the great thinker and mathematician, there was none who exhibited such a genius, as did Pascal. Pascal proved his strength in technical matters as well as in pure sciences. His invention of the first calculating machine paved way for present day calculators and computers. The computer language Pascal is named after this great man.

If Rene Descartes contribution be likened to a free flowing river that serves large tracts of barren land, irrigating and serving people and life all along its course, then Pascal's could be likened to a trickle of a river, a short way from its source to disappear underground, only to appear miles away on the other side of the mountain, probably unrecognised, to reappear in full power and fertilize a province.