Blaise Pascal - Birthday Boy

Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher, was a child prodigy, who was educated by his father. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences, where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators and the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by expanding the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote powerfully in defense of the scientific method.

He was a mathematician of the first order. Pascal 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 corresponded with Pierre de Fermat from 1654 on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science.

In honor of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics), and Pascal's triangle and Pascal's wager still bear his name.

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