الموضوع
:
أعظم 50 عبقري عبر التاريخ : ما سر هذه العبقرية؟ دراسة بحثية
عرض مشاركة واحدة
09-14-2012, 12:08 AM
المشاركة
34
ايوب صابر
مراقب عام سابقا
اوسمتي
مجموع الاوسمة
: 4
تاريخ الإنضمام :
Sep 2009
رقم العضوية :
7857
المشاركات:
12,767
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal was a French physicist, religious philosopher, and great mathematician. Pascal was a child prodigy and was taught a lot by his father. Pascal’s contributions included: mechanical calculators, concepts of pressure, concepts of vacuum, and the study of fluids. In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French classical period. His name (Pascal) has been given to the SI unit of pressure, some programming language, and Pascal’s law.
Blaise Pascal (
French pronunciation:
;
19 June 1623
– 19 August 1662), was a
French
mathematician
,
physicist
,
inventor
,
writer
and
Christian
philosopher
. He was a
child prodigy
who was educated by his father, a tax collector in
Rouen
. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied
sciences
where he made important contributions to the study of
fluids
, and clarified the concepts of
pressure
and
vacuum
by generalizing the work of
Evangelista Torricelli
. Pascal also wrote in defense of the
scientific method
.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes
[1]
he invented the
mechanical calculator
.
[2]
[3]
He built twenty of these machines (called
pascal's calculator
and later pascaline) in the following ten years.
[4]
Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of
projective geometry
at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with
Pierre de Fermat
on
probability theory
, strongly influencing the development of modern
economics
and
social science
. Following
Galileo
and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted
Aristotle's
followers who insisted that
nature abhors a vacuum
. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within
Catholicism
known by its detractors as
Jansenism
.
[5]
His father died in 1651. Following a
mystical
experience in late 1654, he had his "second conversion", abandoned his scientific work, and devoted himself to philosophy and
theology
. His two most famous works date from this period: the
Lettres provinciales
and the
Pensées
, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and
Jesuits
. In this year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetical triangle. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the
cycloid
and its use in calculating the volume of solids.
Pascal had poor health especially after his eighteenth year and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.
[6]
Early life and education
Pascal was born in
Clermont-Ferrand
; he lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the age of three.
His father,
Étienne Pascal
(1588–1651
), who also had an interest in science and mathematics, was a local judge and member of the "
Noblesse de Robe
". Pascal had two sisters, the younger
Jacqueline
and the elder Gilberte.
In 1631, five years after the death of his wife, Étienne Pascal moved with his children to Paris. The newly arrived family soon hired Louise Delfault, a maid who eventually became an instrumental member of the family. Étienne, who never remarried, decided that he alone would educate his children, for they all showed extraordinary intellectual ability, particularly his son Blaise. The young Pascal showed an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science.
Particularly of interest to Pascal was a work of Desargues on
conic sections
. Following Desargues' thinking, the sixteen-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a short treatise on what was called the "Mystic Hexagram",
Essai pour les coniques
("Essay on Conics") and sent it—his first serious work of mathematics—to
Père Mersenne
in Paris; it is known still today as
Pascal's theorem
. It states that if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle (or conic) then the three intersection points of opposite sides lie on a line (called the Pascal line).
Pascal's work was so precocious that Descartes was convinced that Pascal's father had written it. When assured by Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son not the father, Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: "I do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics more appropriate than those of the ancients," adding, "but other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a sixteen-year-old child."
[9]
In France at that time offices and positions could be—and were—bought and sold. In 1631 Étienne sold his position as second president of the
Cour des Aides
for 65,665
livres
.
[10]
The money was invested in a
government bond
which provided if not a lavish then certainly a comfortable income which allowed the Pascal family to move to, and enjoy, Paris. But in 1638 Richelieu, desperate for money to carry on the
Thirty Years' War
, defaulted on the government's bonds. Suddenly Étienne Pascal's worth had dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than 7,300.
Like so many others, Étienne was eventually forced to flee Paris because of his opposition to the fiscal policies of
Cardinal Richelieu
, leaving his three children in the care of his neighbor Madame Sainctot, a great beauty with an infamous past who kept one of the most glittering and intellectual salons in all France. It was only when Jacqueline performed well in a children's play with Richelieu in attendance that Étienne was pardoned. In time Étienne was back in good graces with the cardinal, and in 1639 had been appointed the king's commissioner of taxes in the city of
Rouen
— a city whose tax records, thanks to uprisings, were in utter chaos.
In 1642, in an effort to ease his father's endless, exhausting calculations, and recalculations, of taxes owed and paid, Pascal, not yet nineteen, constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called
Pascal's calculator
or the Pascaline. The
Musée des Arts et Métiers
in Paris and the
Zwinger museum
in
Dresden
,
Germany
, exhibit two of his original mechanical calculators. Though these machines are early forerunners to
computer engineering
, the calculator failed to be a great commercial success. Because it was extraordinarily expensive the
Pascaline
became little more than a toy, and
status symbol
, for the very rich both in France and throughout Europe. However, Pascal continued to make improvements to his design through the next decade and built twenty machines in total.
يتيم الام في سن الـ 3
رد مع الإقتباس