Blaise Pascal
1623-1662
Pascal's Principle
If an external pressure is applied to a confined fluid, the pressure at every point within the fluid increases by that amount.
Pout = Pin ð Fout/Aout = Fin/Ain
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Pascal
was a French
mathematician,
physicist, and
religious
philosopher. He was a
child prodigy who was educated by his father, a
civil servant. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and
applied
sciences where he made important contributions to the
construction of mechanical
calculators, the study of
fluids, and clarified the concepts of
pressure and
vacuum by generalizing the work of
Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the
scientific method. Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped create two major new areas of research. He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. His results caused many disputes before being accepted. |
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In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement
within
Catholicism known by its detractors as
Jansenism. His father died in 1651. Following a
mystical experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion",
abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and
theology. His two most famous works date from this period: the
Lettres provinciales and the
Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists
and
Jesuits. In this year, he also wrote an important treatise on the
arithmetic of triangles. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the
cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
Pascal had poor health throughout his life and his death came just 2 months after his 39th birthday