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Blaise Pascal: Clermont France
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Blaise Pascal was a French physicist, mathematician, and philosopher. He was born in Clermont France on June 19, 1623. He made important contributions to probability theory, the study of fluids, and clarified concepts such as vacuum and pressure. He heavily studied in the natural sciences, and built mechanical calculators. He would eventually turn from science to philosophy and theology after a mystical experience he encountered.
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Blaise Pascal was born one of three children on 19 June 1623, in the town of Clermont-Ferrand in rural France. Unfortunately, his mother died when he was only three. The family later moved to Paris.
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Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont in Auvergne on June 19, 1623, the son of the president of the Court of Aids of Clermont. He was a precocious child, and soon showed amazing mathematical talent. His early training was scientific rather than literary or theological, and scientific interests predominated during the first period of his activity. He corresponded with the most distinguished scholars of the time, and made important contributions to pure and applied mathematics and to physics.
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Blaise Pascal was born at Clermont-Ferrand on June 19, 1623. He was the son of étienne Pascal, king's counselor and later president of the Court of Aids at Clermont. Blaise's mother died in 1626, and he was left with his two sisters, Gilberte and Jacqueline. In 1631 the family moved to Paris.
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The Pascals (Étienne, Blaise, and Jacqueline) left Paris again during the civil war known as the Fronde (1648), but returned later that year to another address in the French capital. The settlement agreed by Mazarin and the regent with the parlement to end the Fronde meant that Étienne had become redundant as a tax-collector in Rouen. This return to Paris was the beginning of a radical change in the family security that Blaise Pascal had enjoyed since his earliest years. His older sister Gilberte had married Florin Périer in June 1641 and had moved to Clermont-Ferrand. However, his younger sister, Jacqueline, expressed a desire, in May 1648, to become a nun and enter the Port-Royal convent in Paris, which was under the spiritual supervision of Jansenists and where one of Arnauld's sisters was a prominent Abbess. Étienne's opposition caused Jacqueline to defer implementing her decision as long as he was still alive.
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Meantime, an accident had brought the Pascal family into contact with Jansenist doctrine, and Blaise became an ardent convert. Jansenism, which took its name from Jansenius, the bishop of Ypres, had its headquarters in the Cistercian Abbey of Port-Royal, and was one of the most rigorous and lofty developments of post-Reformation Catholicism. In doctrine it somewhat resembled Calvinism in its insistence on Grace and Predestination at the expense of the freedom of the will, and in its cultivation of a thoroughgoing logical method of apologetics. In practise it represented an austere and even ascetic morality, and it did much to raise the ethical and intellectual level of seventeenth century France.
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