Today is a great day to remember another one of my favorite mathematicians, Blaise Pascal, who was born #onthisday 400 years ago. Pascal was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, inventor, engineer and theologian.

In his short life (he lived only 39 years), he was a pioneer in the fields of game theory and probability theory. In the area of philosophy, he was an early pioneer in existentialism. And as a writer on theology and religion, he was a defender of Christianity.

In 1642 he invented and built the first mechanical calculating machine, the Pascaline, which today is known as Pascal's calculator. He built 20 or so of these beautiful machines (after building 50 prototypes), a few of which survive to this day [1].

And of course, there's the fantastic Pascal's Triangle, a triangular array of the binomial coefficients (and so much more) which Pascal studied and is named in his honor.

#math #pascaline #pascal #pascalstriangle

References
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[1] "Pascal's calculator", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator

La #pascaline , initialement dénommée "machine d’arithmétique" puis "roue pascaline", est une #calculatrice mécanique inventée par #BlaisePascal et considérée comme la première machine à calculer. C'est en 1642, à l'âge de dix-neuf ans, qu'il en conçut l’idée, voulant soulager la tâche de son père qui devait remettre en ordre les recettes fiscales De #HauteNormandie .

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline

#chiffrement #calculabilité