Brou kouassi blaise pascal biography

The Pascaline was a numerical wheel calculator with movable dials, each representing a numerical digit. The invention, however, was not without its glitches: There was a discrepancy between the calculator's design and the structure of French currency at the time. Pascal continued to work on improving the device, with 50 prototypes produced bybut the Pascaline was never a big seller.

InPascal starting writing more of his theorems in The Generation of Conic Sectionsbut he pushed the work aside until the following decade. At the end of the s, Pascal temporarily focused his experiments on the physical sciences. Inby having his brother-in-law take readings of the barometric pressure at various altitudes on a mountain Pascal was too poor of health to make the trek himselfhe validated Torricelli's theory concerning the cause of barometrical variations.

In the s, Pascal set about trying to create a perpetual motion machine, the purpose of which was to produce more energy than it used. In the process, he stumbled upon an accidental invention and in Pascal's roulette machine was born. Aptly, he derived its name from the French word for "little wheel.

Brou kouassi blaise pascal biography: an Ivorian politician and physician who

Overlapping his work on the roulette machine was Pascal's correspondence with mathematical theorist Pierre de Fermat, which began in Through their letters discussing gambling and Pascal's own experiments, he found that there is a fixed likelihood of a particular outcome when it comes to the roll of the dice. This discovery was the basis of the mathematical theory of probability, with Pascal's writings on the subject published posthumously.

Although the specific dates are uncertain, Pascal also reportedly invented a primitive form of the wristwatch. It was an informal invention to say the least: The mathematician was known to strap his pocket watch to his wrist with a piece of string, presumably for the sake of convenience while tinkering with other inventions. Antoine Arnauld was a Sorbonne theologian who defended Jansenist beliefs and thus found his position under fire from papal doctrine and university faculty.

Pascal wrote a series of pseudonymous open letters from that ultimately came to be known as Les Provinciales. The writings defended Arnauld and critiqued Jesuit beliefs while exhibiting a groundbreaking style, relying on relatively tight, sharp prose with irony and satire. The most oft cited portion of the collection is Pascal's famed "Wager," in which he states that it is more advantageous for religious skeptics to embrace a belief in God as they ultimately have more to lose if a higher power is revealed after death.

Pascal, a complex personality, was described by biographer Donald Adamson as "precocious, stubbornly persevering, a perfectionist, pugnacious to the point of bullying ruthlessness yet seeking to be meek and humble. Pascal died of a malignant stomach tumor at his sister Gilberte's home in Paris on August 19, By then, the tumor had metastasized in his brain.

Brou kouassi blaise pascal biography: 1. Mr Pascal Affi N'Guessan.

He was 39 years old. Inyear-old Pascal lost interest in scientific work and decided to focus solely on theology and philosophy. After undergoing his religious conversion, he started writing his first significant religious work entitled The Provincial Letterswhich emphasized the fact that charity makes possible the union of the soul with the mystical body of Jesus.

This widely praised body of work comprising 18 letters which were written in defense of theologian Antoine Arnauld denounced case-based reasoning, the popular ethical method used by the Jesuits in the late 17th century. They were motivated to use reasoning to justify a multitude of sins before God. According to Pascal, a rational individual should live as if God does exist and strive to believe in God for an infinite gain.

Brou kouassi blaise pascal biography: PASSION • AMBITION • HUMILITY

Christiaan Huygenslearning of the subject from the correspondence of Pascal and Fermat, wrote the first book on the subject. Later figures who continued the development of the brou kouassi blaise pascal biography include Abraham de Moivre and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The work done by Fermat and Pascal into the calculus of probabilities laid important groundwork for Leibniz 's formulation of the calculus.

Pascal concluded with the proof. In the same treatise, Pascal gave an explicit statement of the principle of mathematical induction. InPascal, while suffering from a toothache, began considering several problems concerning the cycloid. His toothache disappeared, and he took this as a heavenly sign to proceed with his research. Eight days later he had completed his essay [ 28 ] and, to publicize the results, proposed a contest.

Pascal proposed three questions relating to the center of gravityarea and volume of the cycloid, with the winner or winners to receive prizes of 20 and 40 Spanish doubloons. Wallis published Wren's proof crediting Wren in Wallis's Tractus Duogiving Wren priority for the first published proof. Pascal contributed to several fields in physics, most notably the fields of fluid mechanics and pressure.

In honour of his scientific contributions, the name Pascal has been given to the SI unit of pressure and 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. His work in the fields of hydrodynamics and hydrostatics centered on the principles of hydraulic fluids.

His inventions include the hydraulic press using hydraulic pressure to multiply force and the syringe. He proved that hydrostatic pressure depends not on the weight of the fluid but on the elevation difference. He demonstrated this principle by attaching a thin tube to a barrel full of water and filling the tube with water up to the level of the third floor of a building.

This caused the barrel to leak, in what became known as Pascal's barrel experiment. ByPascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli 's experimentation with barometers. Having replicated an experiment that involved placing a tube filled with mercury upside down in a bowl of mercury, Pascal questioned what force kept some mercury in the tube and what filled the space above the mercury in the tube.

At the time, most scientists including Descartes believed in a plenum, i. Following more experimentation in this vein, in Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide "New experiments with the vacuum"which detailed basic rules describing to what degree various liquids could be supported by air pressure. It also provided reasons why it was indeed a vacuum above the column of liquid in a barometer tube.

The Torricellian vacuum found that air pressure is equal to the weight of 30 inches of mercury. If air has a finite weight, Earth's atmosphere must have a maximum height. Pascal reasoned that if true, air pressure on a high mountain must be less than at a lower altitude. The weather was chancy last Saturday Several important people of the city of Clermont had asked me to let them know when I would make the ascent I was delighted to have them with me in this great work First I poured 16 pounds of quicksilver I repeated the experiment two more times while standing in the same spot I attached one of the tubes to the vessel and marked the height of the quicksilver and Taking the other tube and a portion of the quick silver I repeated the experiment five times with care Pascal replicated the experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up to the top of the bell tower at the church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucheriea height of about 50 metres.

The mercury dropped two lines. He found with both experiments that an ascent of 7 fathoms lowers the mercury by half a line. Blaise Pascal Chairs are given to outstanding international scientists to conduct their research in the Ile de France brou kouassi blaise pascal biography. In the winter ofPascal's year-old father broke his hip when he slipped and fell on an icy street of Rouen; given the man's age and the state of medicine in the 17th century, a broken hip could be a very serious condition, perhaps even fatal.

Rouen was home to two of the finest doctors in 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 Both men were followers of Jean Guillebertproponent of a splinter group from Catholic teaching known as Jansenism.

This still fairly small sect was making surprising inroads into the French Catholic community at that time. It espoused rigorous Augustinism. Blaise spoke with the doctors frequently, and after their successful treatment of his father, borrowed from them works by Jansenist authors. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort of "first conversion" and began to write on theological subjects in the course of the following year.

Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what some biographers have called his "worldly period" — His father died in and left his inheritance to Pascal and his sister Jacqueline, for whom Pascal acted as conservator. Jacqueline announced that she would soon become a postulant in the Jansenist convent of Port-Royal.

Pascal was deeply affected and very sad, not because of her brou kouassi blaise pascal biography, but because of his chronic poor health; he needed her just as she had needed him. Suddenly there was war in the Pascal 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 of abandonment By the end of October ina truce had been reached between brother and sister. In return for a healthy annual stipend, Jacqueline signed over her part of the inheritance to her brother. Gilberte had already been given her inheritance in the form 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 For a while, Pascal pursued the life of a bachelor. During visits to his sister at Port-Royal inhe displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not drawn to God. On the 23 of November,between and at night, Pascal had an intense religious experience and immediately wrote a brief note to himself which began: "Fire.

The story of a carriage accident as having led to the experience described in the Memorial is disputed by some scholars. For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the Provincial Letters.

In literature, Pascal is regarded as one of the most important authors of the French Classical Period and is read today as one of the greatest masters of French prose. His use of satire and wit influenced later polemicists. Beginning in —57, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistrya popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period especially the Jesuitsand in particular Antonio Escobar.

Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins. The letter series was published between and under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV. The king ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in Inin the midst of the formulary controversythe Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved with the school had to sign a papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical.

Even Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments. Aside from their religious influence, the Provincial Letters were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

It is in the Provincial Letters that Pascal made his oft-quoted apology for writing a long letter, as he had not had time to write a shorter one. From Letter XVI, as translated by Thomas M'Crie: 'Reverend fathers, my letters were not wont either to be so prolix, or to follow so closely on one another. Want of time must plead my excuse for both of these faults.

The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter. He was a dualist following Descartes. In terms of God, Descartes and Pascal disagreed. Pascal wrote that "I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God, but he couldn't avoid letting him put the world in motion; afterwards he didn't need God anymore".

Humans "are in darkness and estranged from God" because "he has hidden Himself from their knowledge". He cared above all about the 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 so we find it easy to reject God continually and deceive ourselves about our own sinfulness".

The work was unpublished until over a century after his death. Here, Pascal looked into the issue of discovering truths, arguing that the ideal of such a method would be to found all propositions on already established truths. At the same time, however, he claimed this was impossible because such established truths would require other truths to back them up—first principles, therefore, cannot be reached.

Based on this, Pascal argued that the procedure used 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 true. 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. In De l'Art de persuader "On the Art of Persuasion"Pascal looked deeper into geometry's axiomatic methodspecifically the question of how people come to be convinced of the axioms upon which later conclusions are based.

Pascal agreed with Montaigne that achieving certainty in these axioms and conclusions through human methods is impossible. He asserted that these principles can be grasped only through intuition, and that this fact underscored the necessity for submission to God in searching out truths. When commenting on one particular section Thought 72Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language.

Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets "Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other subjects" and soon thereafter became a classic. One of the Apologie ' s main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of Pyrrhonism and Stoicismpersonalized by Montaigne on one hand, and Epictetus on the other, in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God.

Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world. InPascal fell seriously ill. During his last years, he frequently tried to reject the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Don't pity me, sickness is the natural state of Christians, because in it we are, as we should always be, in the suffering of evils, in the deprivation of all the goods and pleasures of the senses, free from all the passions that work throughout the course of life, without ambition, without avarice, in the continual expectation of death.

Later that year, his sister Jacqueline died, which convinced Pascal to cease his polemics on Jansenism. Pascal also designated the operation principles which were later used to plan public transportation - the carriages had a fixed route, fixed price five solshence the nameand left even if there were no passengers. InPascal's illness became more violent, and his emotional condition had severely worsened since his sister's death.

Aware that his health was fading quickly, he sought a move to the hospital for incurable diseases, but his doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried. In Paris on 18 AugustPascal went into convulsions and received extreme unction. An autopsy performed after his death revealed grave problems with his stomach and other organs of his abdomen, along with damage to his brain.

Despite the autopsy, the cause of his poor health was never precisely determined, though speculation focuses on tuberculosisstomach canceror a combination of the two.