GREAT SCIENTISTS OF WORLD -BLAISE PASCAL

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and theologian. In mathematics, he was an early pioneer in the fields of game theory and probability theory. In philosophy he was an early pioneer in existentialism.

 In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines), establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.

 
Pascal      invented an adding machine with automatic carry between digits, and the "Pascal Triangle" of coefficients of the binomial series; also the inventor of the wheelbarrow, the omnibus, and the roulette wheel.

He developed the modern theory of probability. He also formulated the concept of pressure (between 1646 and 1648) and showed that the pressure in a fluid is transmitted through the fluid in all directions (i.e. Pascal's law).

Pascal's law states that a pressure applied to a fluid in a closed container is transmitted equally to every point of the fluid and the walls of the container, as seen in Equation 2. P = F / A (Equation 2) Where P is the pressure, F is the force, and A is the area.

 

 Pascal's law states that a change in pressure at any point in an enclosed fluid is transmitted equally throughout the fluid. The ability of fluids to transmit pressure in this way can be very useful—from getting toothpaste out of a tube to applying the brakes on a car.

 

A typical application of Pascal's principle for gases and liquids is the automobile lift seen in many service stations (the hydraulic jack). Increased air pressure produced by an air compressor is transmitted through the air to the surface of oil in an underground reservoir.

Few more applications include a hydraulic jack and hydraulic press and forced amplification is used in the braking system of most cars.  even the lift generated on airplane wings can be explained using Pascal's principle. Pascal's principle is based on the idea that fluids at rest are incompressible, allowing very large forces to be transmitted with the application of a smaller force.

 Pascal's law allows forces to be multiplied.

 

 Pascal was also a mathematician of the first order.  He wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry, known as Pascal’s Theorem, which states that, if a hexagon is inscribed in a circle, then the three intersection points of opposite sides lie on a single line, called the Pascal line. As a young man, he built a functional calculating machine, able to perform additions and subtractions.

Pascal’s Triangle

 

He is best known, however, for Pascal’s Triangle, a convenient tabular presentation of binomial co-efficients, where each number is the sum of the two numbers directly above it. A binomial is a simple type of algebraic expression which has just two terms operated on only by addition, subtraction, multiplication and positive whole-number exponents, such as (x + y)². The co-efficient

produced when a binomial is expanded form a symmetrical triangle.

 

 

 

 

 Pascal also made the conceptual leap to use the Triangle to help solve problems in probability theory. In fact, it was through his collaboration and correspondence with his French contemporary Pierre de Fermat and the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens on the subject that the mathematical theory of probability was born. Before Pascal, there was no actual theory of probability.

 

 

 

 In  Computer  programming

 Pascal is a general purpose, high-level procedural programming language developed by Niklaus Wirth. It is named after the French mathematician, scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal, in honor of his contributions to construct the first mechanical calculator called Pascaline (Arithmetic Machine) in 1642.

 Blaise Pascal