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Blaise Pascal: Clermont France
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Pascal's father, Étienne Pascal, was presiding judge of the tax court at Clermont-Ferrand. His mother died in 1626, and in 1631 the family moved to Paris. Étienne, who was respected as a mathematician, devoted himself henceforth to the education of his children.
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There were problems faced by Pascal in the design of the calculator which were due to the design of the French currency at that time. There were 20 sols in a livre and 12 deniers in a sol. The system remained in France until 1799 but in Britain a system with similar multiples lasted until 1971. Pascal had to solve much harder technical problems to work with this division of the livre into 240 than he would have had if the division had been 100. However production of the machines started in 1642 but, as Adamson writes in [3],
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Following an accident at the Neuilly bridge where the horses plunged over the parapet but the carriage miraculously survived in 1654, Pascal abandoned mathematics and physics for philosophy and theology. In 1660, King Louis XIV of France ordered the shredding and burning of Pascal's The Provincial Letters, a defense of the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld.
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Pascal was born June 19, 1623 in Clermont, France, and moved to Paris in 1631. His mother died when he was three, and he was raised by his father, a respected mathematician, who personally directed his education.
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Pascal did not publish any philosophical works during his relatively brief lifetime. His status in French literature today is based primarily on the posthumous publication of a notebook in which he drafted or recorded ideas for a defence of Christianity, the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (1670). His philosophical commitments can be gleaned from the contributions he made to scientific and theological debates in France in the mid-seventeenth century.
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