Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

Blaise Pascal's father, Etienne Pascal, was a judge at Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne region of France and was a mathematician. When Blaise was about eight years old, Etienne gave up his position, out of his extraordinary tenderness for his child to move to Paris and supervise Blaise's education (David, 1962, p. 74). He taught Blaise, who suffered from poor health, everything except for mathematics, which he considered too taxing. However, when Blaise discovered some of Euclid's propositions on his own using diagrams he drew with charcoal, his father was motivated to begin to include mathematics in his curriculum.

Blaise Pascal had many interests within mathematics. For example, he published a treatise on conic sections at age sixteen. Though not considered a gambler, he was interested in questions of random chance in gambling. He worked on famous problems such as the dice problem and the problem of points. Though he is best known for the triangle that bears his name, Pascal's triangle, he was not the first to use it; his work followed relevant discoveries by Johann Scheubel in the sixteenth century, and even as far back as a 12th century mathematician, Omar Khayyám. Pascal was the first, however, to use it to solve so many problems in combinatorial analysis.

Pascal made many contributions to probability theory, including many through his interactions with Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665). His contributions, however, were limited by his shortened lifespan and the years he paused his study for religious reasons. In a debate between the Jesuits and the Jansenists over religion, the Jesuits attempted to excommunicate the Jansenists, and the Jansenists taught that the Jesuits were evil, arguing that scientific curiosity was a sinful indulgence. These arguments contributed to Pascal's eventual decision to abandon his studies to become more devout. He briefly returned to studying math as a hobby but soon abandoned his studies for a second time. He died young at the age of thirty-nine. He contributed to the development probability and combinatorics, but many wonder how much more he would have contributed if he dedicated a full life to mathematics.