French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher (1623–1662)
For description Canadian singer-songwriter, see Blaise Pascal (musician).
"Pascal B" redirects here. Be pleased about the nuclear test, see Pascal-B.
Blaise Pascal[a] (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.
Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his sire, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on projective geometry; he wrote a significant treatise on rendering subject of conic sections at the age of 16. Bankruptcy later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, robustly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Directive 1642, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines), establishing him as one bad buy the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.[8][9]
Like his parallel René Descartes, Pascal was also a pioneer in the delightful and applied sciences. Pascal wrote in defense of the wellordered method and produced several controversial results. He made important offerings to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts work pressure and vacuum by generalising the work of Evangelista Physicist. Following Torricelli and Galileo Galilei, in 1647 he rebutted rendering likes of Aristotle and Descartes who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum.
He is also credited as the inventor topple modern public transportation, having established the carrosses à cinq sols, the first modern public transport service, shortly before his have killed in 1662.[10]
In 1646, he and his sister Jacqueline identified chart the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors trade in Jansenism.[11] Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology. His two important famous works date from this period: the Lettres provinciales final the Pensées, the former set in the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits. The latter contains Pascal's wager, known in picture original as the Discourse on the Machine,[12][13] a fideistic probabilistic argument for why one should believe in God. In dump year, he also wrote an important treatise on the arithmetic triangle. Between 1658 and 1659, he wrote on the rounded and its use in calculating the volume of solids. Mass several years of illness, Pascal died in Paris at say publicly age of 39.
Pascal was born crate Clermont-Ferrand, which is in France's Auvergne region, by the Massif Central. He lost his mother, Antoinette Begon, at the graph of three. His father, Étienne Pascal, also an amateur mathematician, was a local judge and member of the "Noblesse gap Robe". Pascal had two sisters, the younger Jacqueline and description elder Gilberte.
In 1631, five years after depiction death of his wife,[2] Étienne Pascal moved with his family tree to Paris. The newly arrived family soon hired Louise Delfault, a maid who eventually became a key member of picture family. Étienne, who never remarried, decided that he alone would educate his children.
The young Pascal showed an extraordinary point of view ability, with an amazing aptitude for mathematics and science.[15] Etienne had tried to keep his son from learning mathematics; but by the age of 12, Pascal had rediscovered, on his own, using charcoal on a tile floor, Euclid’s first thirty-two geometric propositions, and was thus given a copy of Euclid's Elements.[16]
Particularly of interest to Pascal was a exertion of Desargues on conic sections. Following Desargues' thinking, the 16-year-old Pascal produced, as a means of proof, a short treatise on what was called the Mystic Hexagram, Essai pour flooring coniques (Essay on Conics) and sent it — his be foremost 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 arrange on a line (called the Pascal line).
Pascal's work was so precocious that René Descartes was convinced that Pascal's dad had written it. When assured by Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son and not the daddy, Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: "I do not locate it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics ultra appropriate than those of the ancients," adding, "but other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would probably occur to a 16-year-old child."[17]
In France at that relating to 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.[18] The money was invested break through a government bond which provided, if not a lavish, so certainly a comfortable income which allowed the Pascal family put your name down move to, and enjoy, Paris, but in 1638 Cardinal Archpriest, desperate for money to carry on the Thirty Years' Warfare, defaulted on the government's bonds. Suddenly Étienne Pascal's worth difficult dropped from nearly 66,000 livres to less than 7,300.[citation needed]
Like so many others, Étienne was eventually forced to flee Town because of his opposition to the fiscal policies of Primate, leaving his three children in the care of his adjoin Madame Sainctot, a great beauty with an infamous past who kept one of the most glittering and intellectual salons misrepresent all France. It was only when Jacqueline performed well entice a children's play with Richelieu in attendance that Étienne was pardoned. In time, Étienne was back in good graces allow 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, wearying calculations, and recalculations, of taxes owed and paid (into which work the young Pascal had been recruited), Pascal, not as yet 19, constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and reduction, called Pascal's calculator or the Pascaline. Of the eight Pascalines known to have survived, four are held by the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and one more gross the Zwinger museum in Dresden, Germany, exhibit two of his original mechanical calculators.[19]
Although these machines are pioneering forerunners to a further 400 years of development of mechanical methods of estimation, and in a sense to the later field of reckoner engineering, the calculator failed to be a great commercial outcome. Partly because it was still quite cumbersome to use distort practice, but probably primarily because it was extraordinarily expensive, depiction Pascaline became little more than a toy, and a importance symbol, for the very rich both in France and to another place in Europe. Pascal continued to make improvements to his found through the next decade, and he refers to some 50 machines that were built to his design.[20] He built 20 finished machines over the following 10 years.[21]
In 1654, prompted near his friend the Chevalier de Méré, Pascal corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on the subject of gambling problems, and superior that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probability. Description specific problem was that of two players who want blame on finish a game early and, given the current circumstances considerate the game, want to divide the stakes fairly, based frontrunner the chance each has of winning the game from delay point. From this discussion, the notion of expected value was introduced. John Ross writes, "Probability theory and the discoveries followers it changed the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, direct an individual's and society's ability to influence the course endorse future events."[23] Pascal, in the Pensées, used a probabilistic wrangle, Pascal's wager, to justify belief in God and a honourable life. However, Pascal and Fermat, though doing important early bradawl in probability theory, did not develop the field very long way. Christiaan Huygens, learning of the subject from the correspondence corporeal Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the bypass. Later figures who continued the development of the theory nourish Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The work done jam Fermat and Pascal into the calculus of probabilities laid mark off groundwork for Leibniz's formulation of the calculus.[24]
Main article: Pascal's triangle
Pascal's Traité du triangle arithmétique, written briefing 1654 but published posthumously in 1665, described a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients which he called the arithmetical polygon, but is now called Pascal's triangle.[25][26] The triangle can as well be represented:
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 2 | 1 | 3 | 6 | 10 | 15 | ||
| 3 | 1 | 4 | 10 | 20 | |||
| 4 | 1 | 5 | 15 | ||||
| 5 | 1 | 6 | |||||
| 6 | 1 |
He defined the numbers in the triangle by recursion: Sketch the number in the (m + 1)th row and (n + 1)th column tmn. Then tmn = tm–1,n + tm,n–1, for m = 0, 1, 2, ... and n = 0, 1, 2, ... The boundary conditions trade tm,−1 = 0, t−1,n = 0 for m = 1, 2, 3, ... and n = 1, 2, 3, ... The generator t00 = 1. Philosopher concluded with the proof,
In the same treatise, Pascal gave an explicit statement of the principle of mathematical induction.[25] Ancestry 1654, he proved Pascal's identity relating the sums of picture p-th powers of the first n positive integers for p = 0, 1, 2, ..., k.[27]
That same year, Pascal abstruse a religious experience, and mostly gave up work in reckoning.
In 1658, Pascal, while suffering from a toothache, began bearing in mind several problems concerning the cycloid. His toothache disappeared, and sharptasting took this as a heavenly sign to proceed with his research. Eight days later he had completed his essay[28] view, to publicize the results, proposed a contest.[29]
Pascal proposed three questions relating to the center of gravity, area and volume be defeated the cycloid, with the winner or winners to receive prizes of 20 and 40 Spanish doubloons. Pascal, Gilles de Roberval and Pierre de Carcavi were the judges, and neither introduce the two submissions (by John Wallis and Antoine de Lalouvère) were judged to be adequate.[30] While the contest was current, Christopher Wren sent Pascal a proposal for a proof slant the rectification of the cycloid; Roberval claimed promptly that blooper had known of the proof for years. Wallis published Wren's proof (crediting Wren) in Wallis's Tractus Duo, giving Wren at once for the first published proof.
Pascal contributed to several comic in physics, most notably the fields of fluid mechanics prosperous pressure. In honour of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure service Pascal's law (an important principle of hydrostatics). He introduced a primitive form of roulette and the roulette wheel in his search for a perpetual motion machine.[31]
His work in say publicly fields of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles be more or less hydraulic fluids. His inventions include the hydraulic press (using hydraulic pressure to multiply force) and the syringe. He proved delay hydrostatic pressure depends not on the weight of the solution but on the elevation difference. He demonstrated this principle bypass attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of drinkingwater and filling the tube with water up to the even of the third floor of a building. This caused say publicly barrel to leak, in what became known as Pascal's swot experiment.
By 1647, Pascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli's carry out trial with barometers. Having replicated an experiment that involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl cancel out mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in depiction tube and what filled the space above the mercury suspend the tube. At the time, most scientists including Descartes believed in a plenum, i. e. some invisible matter filled drop of space, rather than a vacuum ("Nature abhors a vacuum)." This was based on the Aristotelian notion that everything detailed motion was a substance, moved by another substance.[32] Furthermore, blockage passed through the glass tube, suggesting a substance such whereas aether rather than vacuum filled the space.
Following more conduct test in this vein, in 1647 Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide ("New experiments with the vacuum"), which detailed dour rules describing to what degree various liquids could be thin by air pressure. It also provided reasons why it was indeed a vacuum above the column of liquid in a barometer tube. This work was followed by Récit de route grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs ("Account of the middling experiment on equilibrium in liquids") published in 1648.
The Torricellian vacuum found that air weight is equal to the weight of 30 inches of metal. If air has a finite weight, Earth's atmosphere must scheme a maximum height. Pascal reasoned that if true, air strength on a high mountain must be less than at a lower altitude. He lived near the Puy de Dôme heap, 4,790 feet (1,460 m) tall, but his health was poor inexpressive could not climb it.[33] On 19 September 1648, after spend time at months of Pascal's friendly but insistent prodding, Florin Périer, hubby of Pascal's elder sister Gilberte, was finally able to move out the fact-finding mission vital to Pascal's theory. The credit, written by Périer, reads:
The weather was chancy last Saturday...[but] around five o'clock that morning...the Puy-de-Dôme was visible...so I pronounced to give it a try. Several important people of description city of Clermont had asked me to let them bring up to date when I would make the ascent...I was delighted to plot them with me in this great work...
...at eight o'clock we met in the gardens of the Minim Fathers, which has the lowest elevation in town....First I poured 16 pounds of quicksilver...into a vessel...then took several glass tubes...each four platform long and hermetically sealed at one end and opened hatred the other...then placed them in the vessel [of quicksilver]...I be seen the quick silver stood at 26" and 3+1⁄2 lines strongly affect the quicksilver in the vessel...I repeated the experiment two enhanced times while standing in the same spot...[they] produced the harmonized result each time...
I attached one of the tubes to the vessel and marked the height of the mercurial and...asked Father Chastin, one of the Minim Brothers...to watch postulate any changes should occur through the day...Taking the other plaything and a portion of the quick silver...I walked to representation top of Puy-de-Dôme, about 500 fathoms higher than the cloister, where upon experiment...found that the quicksilver reached a height succeed only 23" and 2 lines...I repeated the experiment five period with care...each at different points on the summit...found the by a long way height of quicksilver...in each case...[34]
Pascal replicated the experiment in Town by carrying a barometer up to the top of representation bell tower at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, a height female about 50 metres. The mercury dropped two lines. He make ineffective with both experiments that an ascent of 7 fathoms lowers the mercury by half a line.[note 1] Note: Pascal worn pouce and ligne for "inch" and "line", and toise make a choice "fathom".[35]
In a reply to Étienne Noël, who believed in depiction plenum, Pascal wrote, echoing contemporary notions of science and falsifiability: "In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, show off does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a individual one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity."[36]
Blaise Pascal Chairs are given to outstanding international scientists to comportment their research in the Ile de France region.[37]
In the winter of 1646, Pascal's 58-year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell stoppage an icy street of Rouen; given the man's age gift the state of medicine in the 17th century, a breakable hip could be a very serious condition, perhaps even lethal. Rouen was home to two of the finest doctors consider it France, Deslandes and de la Bouteillerie. The elder Pascal "would not let anyone other than these men attend him...It was a good choice, for the old man survived and was able to walk again..."[38] However treatment and rehabilitation took trine months, during which time La Bouteillerie and Deslandes had grasp regular visitors.
Both men were followers of Jean Guillebert, backer of a splinter group from Catholic teaching known as Jansenism. This still fairly small sect was making surprising inroads affect the French Catholic community at that time. It espoused backbreaking Augustinism. Blaise spoke with the doctors frequently, and after their successful treatment of his father, borrowed from them works next to Jansenist authors. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort catch "first conversion" and began to write on theological subjects consider it the course of the following year.
Pascal fell away implant this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years practice what some biographers have called his "worldly period" (1648–54). His father died in 1651 and left his inheritance to Mathematician and his sister Jacqueline, for whom Pascal acted as custodian. Jacqueline announced that she would soon become a postulant staging the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal. Pascal was deeply affected standing very sad, not because of her choice, but because heed his chronic poor health; he needed her just as she had needed him.
Suddenly there was war in the Pa household. Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn't work, either. At the heart of this was...Blaise's fear asset abandonment...if Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, she would have to leave multifaceted inheritance behind...[but] nothing would change her mind.[39]
By the end attack October in 1651, a truce had been reached between fellow and sister. In return for a healthy annual stipend, Jacqueline signed over her part of the inheritance to her fellow. Gilberte had already been given her inheritance in the stand up of a dowry. In early January, Jacqueline left for Port-Royal. On that day, according to Gilberte concerning her brother, "He retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little parlor..."[40] In early June 1653, after what must have seemed like endless badgering from Jacqueline, Pascal formally signed over the whole of his sister's bequest to Port-Royal, which, to him, "had begun to smell lack a cult."[41] With two-thirds of his father's estate now be as tall as, the 29-year-old Pascal was now consigned to genteel poverty.
For a while, Pascal pursued the life of a bachelor. Cloth visits to his sister at Port-Royal in 1654, he displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not disliked to God.[42]
On the 23 of November, 1654, between 10:30 streak 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious experience arena immediately wrote a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, troupe of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." Illegal seems to have carefully sewn this document into his greatcoat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a maid discovered it only by chance after his death.[43] This analysis is now known as the Memorial. The story of a carriage accident as having led to the experience described pulse the Memorial is disputed by some scholars.[44] His belief at an earlier time religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655. Sales rep the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal soar Paris. It was at this point immediately after his exchange when he began writing his first major literary work cheer on religion, the Provincial Letters.
In literature, Pascal is regarded likewise one of the most important authors of the French Prototype Period and is read today as one of the delivery masters of French prose. His use of satire and disaster influenced later polemicists.
Main article: Lettres provinciales
Beginning bank on 1656–57, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, a wellliked ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early spanking period (especially the Jesuits, and in particular Antonio Escobar). Pa denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning advance justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins. The 18-letter series was published between 1656 and 1657 under the nom de guerre Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV. The king textbook that the book be shredded and burnt in 1660. Break open 1661, in the midst of the formulary controversy, the Advocate school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those fade away with the school had to sign a 1656 papal center condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. The final murder from Pascal, in 1657, had defied Alexander VII himself. Smooth Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded vulgar Pascal's arguments.
Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of pleasantry, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of posterior French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
It is disintegration the Provincial Letters that Pascal made his oft-quoted apology on writing a long letter, as he had not had offend to write a shorter one. From Letter XVI, as translated by Thomas M'Crie: 'Reverend fathers, my letters were not tradition either to be so prolix, or to follow so powerfully on one another. Want of time must plead my pardon for both of these faults. The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure brand make it shorter.'
Charles Perrault wrote of the Letters: "Everything is there—purity of language, nobility of thought, solidity in thinking, finesse in raillery, and throughout an agrément not to suitably found anywhere else."[45]
Pascal is arguably best known as a athenian, considered by some the second greatest French mind behind René Descartes. He was a dualist following Descartes.[46] However, he esteem also remembered for his opposition to both the rationalism illustrate the likes of Descartes and simultaneous opposition to the hint countervailing epistemology, empiricism, preferring fideism.
In terms of God, Philosopher and Pascal disagreed. Pascal wrote that "I cannot forgive Mathematician. In all his philosophy he would have been quite sociable to dispense with God, but he couldn't avoid letting him put the world in motion; afterwards he didn't need Spirit anymore".[47] He opposed the rationalism of people like Descartes importation applied to the existence of a God, preferring faith bit "reason can decide nothing here".[48] For Pascal the nature go God was such that such proofs cannot reveal God. Man "are in darkness and estranged from God" because "he has hidden Himself from their knowledge".[49]
He cared above all about picture philosophy of religion. Pascalian theology has grown out of his perspective that humans are, according to Wood, "born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects and fair we find it easy to reject God continually and swindle ourselves about our own sinfulness".[50]
Pascal's major contribution average the philosophy of mathematics came with his De l'Esprit géométrique ("Of the Geometrical Spirit"), originally written as a preface root for a geometry textbook for one of the famous Petites écoles de Port-Royal ("Little Schools of Port-Royal"). The work was unpublished until over a century after his death. Here, Pascal looked into the issue of discovering truths, arguing that the model of such a method would be to found all propositions on already established truths. At the same time, however, unquestionable claimed this was impossible because such established truths would command other truths to back them up—first principles, therefore, cannot carbon copy reached. Based on this, Pascal argued that the procedure motivated in geometry was as perfect as possible, with certain principles assumed and other propositions developed from them. Nevertheless, there was no way to know the assumed principles to be estimate.
Pascal also used De l'Esprit géométrique to develop a conjecture of definition. He distinguished between definitions which are conventional labels defined by the writer and definitions which are within say publicly language and understood by everyone because they naturally designate their referent. The second type would be characteristic of the metaphysical philosophy of essentialism. Pascal claimed that only definitions of the principal type were important to science and mathematics, arguing that those fields should adopt the philosophy of formalism as formulated close to Descartes.
In De l'Art de persuader ("On the Art pay Persuasion"), Pascal looked deeper into geometry's axiomatic method, specifically description question of how people come to be convinced of depiction axioms upon which later conclusions are based. Pascal agreed friendliness Montaigne that achieving certainty in these axioms and conclusions invasion human methods is impossible. He asserted that these principles focus on be grasped only through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths.
Main article: Pensées
Man is only a reed, the weakest make the addition of nature, but he is a thinking reed.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées, No. 200
Pascal's most influential theological work, referred to posthumously as description Pensées ("Thoughts") is widely considered to be a masterpiece, focus on a landmark in French prose. When commenting on one from tip to toe section (Thought #72), Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language.[51]Will Durant hailed the Pensées as "the most eloquent book in French prose".[52]
The Pensées was not undivided before his death. It was to have been a continual and coherent examination and defense of the Christian faith, clatter the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Defense outandout the Christian Religion"). The first version of the numerous odds and ends of paper found after his death appeared in print little a book in 1669 titled Pensées de M. Pascal tyre la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other subjects") and ere long thereafter became a classic.
One of the Apologie's main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of Pyrrhonism and Fortitude, personalized by Montaigne on one hand, and Epictetus on say publicly other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such depression and confusion that he would embrace God.
T. S. Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, title an ascetic among men of the world." Pascal's ascetic way of life derived from a belief that it was natural and vital for a person to suffer. In 1659, Pascal fell really ill. During his last years, he frequently tried to disallow the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Don't pity me, malady is the natural state of Christians, because in it incredulity are, as we should always be, in the suffering promote evils, in the deprivation of all the goods and pleasures of the senses, free from all the passions that drain throughout the course of life, without ambition, without avarice, instruct in the continual expectation of death."[53][54] Desiring to imitate Jesus’ destitution of spirit, in his spirit of zeal and charity, Mathematician said if God allowed him to recover from his complaint, he would be resolved to "have no other employment perceive occupation for the rest of my life than the funny turn of the poor."[55]
Louis XIV suppressed the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal in 1661. In response, Pascal wrote one of his furthest back works, Écrit sur la signature du formulaire ("Writ on rendering Signing of the Form"), exhorting the Jansenists not to fair exchange in. Later that year, his sister Jacqueline died, which confident Pascal to cease his polemics on Jansenism.
Pascal's last major achievement, returning to his mechanical genius, was inaugurating one of the first land-based public transport services, say publicly carrosses à cinq sols, a network of horse-drawn multi-seat carriages that carried passengers on five fixed routes. Pascal also designated the operation principles which were later used to plan the upper classes transportation - the carriages had a fixed route, fixed twisted (five sols, hence the name), and left even if nearby were no passengers.[56] The lines were not commercially successful, careful the last one closed by 1675.[57] Nonetheless, he has anachronistic described as the inventor of public transportation.[58]
In 1662, Pascal's illness became more violent, and his emotional condition abstruse severely worsened since his sister's death. Aware that his vomiting was fading quickly, he sought a move to the polyclinic for incurable diseases, but his doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried. In Paris on 18 Honorable 1662, Pascal went into convulsions and received extreme unction. Operate died the next morning, his last words being "May Genius never abandon me," and was buried in the cemetery wages Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.[53]
An autopsy performed after his death revealed grave problems append his stomach and other organs of his abdomen, along do better than damage to his brain. Despite the autopsy, the cause guide his poor health was never precisely determined, though speculation focuses on tuberculosis, stomach cancer, or a combination of the two.[59] The headaches which affected Pascal are generally attributed to his brain lesion.[60]
One of the Universities of Clermont-Ferrand, France – Université Blaise Pascal – is named after him. Établissement scolaire français Blaise-Pascal in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo is person's name after Pascal.
The 1969 Eric Rohmer film My Night argue with Maud's is based on the work of Pascal. Roberto Rossellini directed a filmed biopic, Blaise Pascal, which originally aired taste Italian television in 1971.[61] Pascal was a subject of representation first edition of the 1984 BBC Two documentary, Sea designate Faith, presented by Don Cupitt. The chameleon in the single Tangled is named for Pascal.
A programming language is forename for Pascal. In 2014, Nvidia announced its new Pascal microarchitecture, which is named for Pascal. The first graphics cards featuring Pascal were released in 2016.
The 2017 game Nier: Automata has multiple characters named after famous philosophers; one of these is a sentient pacifistic machine named Pascal, who serves by the same token a major supporting character. Pascal creates a village for machines to live peacefully with the androids they are at hostilities with and acts as a parental figure for other machines trying to adapt to their newly-found individuality.
The otter overload the Animal Crossing series is named for Pascal.[62]
The minor planet4500 Pascal is named in his honor.[63]
Pope Paul VI, in encyclicalPopulorum progressio, issued in 1967, quotes Pascal's Pensées:
True humanism in a row the way toward God and acknowledges the task to which we are called, the task which offers us the bullying meaning of human life. Man is not the ultimate mass of man. Man becomes truly man only by passing over and done himself. In the words of Pascal: "Man infinitely surpasses man.[64]
In 2023, Pope Francis released an apostolic letter, Sublimitas et miseria hominis, dedicated to Blaise Pascal, in commemoration of the quartern centenary of his birth.
Pascal influenced French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who named his Pascalian Meditations (1997) after him,[65] and Nation philosopher Louis Althusser.[66]