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Blaise Pascal: Sciences
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Pascal 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 ... wrote powerfully in defense of the scientific method.
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In 1647, stricken by serious illness, Blaise returned to Paris. Upon the advice of his doctors he relaxed his religious discipline and, though not abandoning faith and devotion, began to frequent the world. Friendships developed with other young men and Blaise became familiar with the emancipated "free-thinker" mentality which provided the background for his later apologetic writings. Also during this period he became convinced that the science of man was of far greater importance than the science of things.
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Pascal ... used De l'Esprit géométrique to develop a theory of definition. He distinguished between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer and definitions which are within the language and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their referent. The second type would be characteristic of the philosophy of essentialism. Pascal claimed that only definitions of the first type were important to science and mathematics, arguing that those fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism as formulated by Descartes.
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At 14, Blaise began attending weekly lectures in mathematics. It was from these weekly meetings of mathematicians that the French Academy of Sciences later developed. When only 16 years old, Blaise wrote a paper on conic sections1 which was acclaimed by his fellow mathematicians as ‘the most powerful and valuable contribution that had been made to mathematical science since the days of Archimedes.’2 This paper ‘laid the foundation for the modern treatment of conic sections.’3
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In 1639, at the age of 16, Blaise wrote his first widely acclaimed mathematical treatise, on the properties of conic sections. In 1642, proving his competence in technical matters as well as in pure science, he constructed the first digital calculating machine; the predecessor of our modern calculators and computers and for which he is remembered by the computer language which bears his name.
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