Solve This!

Hi my name is Blaise Pascal, I was born on June 19, 1623 in Clermont, France. My mother died when I was three, so my father Etienne Begon raised me. I have two sisters Gilberte and Jacqueline. My father didn’t want me to study math, but I took the math books out of the house and studied the angles of a triangle. I found that the three angles of a triangle equal the sum of two right angles. Then my father said I was ready for math. I began to participate with my father in the Mersennes circle with scientists and mathematicians. My father decided to tutor me himself. I wrote a paper about the “Mystic Hexagon” which impressed the members of the circle. One of my sisters wrote a paper saying I was the best mathematician since Archimedes.

I had to suspend my association with the Mersennes circle when my sisters and I had to move to Rouen, because my father was appointed Royal tax official in upper Normandy. I had many talents, I was a mathematician, a physicist, and I wrote spiritual papers. Before I was 13 I found an error in René Descartes’ geometry and proved the 32nd proposition of Euclid. My father retired and moved to Paris in 1631. When I was 30 I invented a calculator known as the Pascaline. I invented the Pascaline to help my father with his job as tax official. My machine could do the work of six accountants, and people feared it would be the cause of unemployment. I was disgusted at society’s reactions to my machine so I renounced my interest in math and science, devoting the rest of my life to God. The basic design of the Pascaline lived on in mechanical calculators for 300 years.

In 1653 I was famous for doing the first extensive study of the Pascal triangle. I later on figured out that I hadn’t invented the Pascal triangle, the Chinese invented 300 years ago, before I was alive. In 1654 I resumed my mathematical studies. I studied the theory of probability with Pierre de Fermat because a friend asked me a question about a gambling game. Then I wrote my 18 epistles under a pseudonym. Then in 1658 a terrible pain ached in my tooth while I was about to study the cycloid curve, then I continued my studies and found that the study of math calmed my tooth ache.

Click here to try making your own Pascal triangle.

Click here to see the Fibonacci sequence in my triangle.

Click here to test your knowledge on me.