Great and Little

Great men and little have the same accidents, the same temptations, the same passions; but one is on the felloe of the wheel and the other near the axle, and so less agitated by the same revolution.

-       Pascal[1]

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[1] Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a civil servant. Anders Hald writes, “To lighten his father’s work as a tax official, Pascal invented a calculating machine for addition and subtraction and took care of its construction and sale.” Pascal’s earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators, 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.

Pascal was a mathematician of the first order. He helped 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. His results caused many disputes before being accepted.

In 1646 Pascal’s family converted to Jansenism. 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 arithmetic of triangles. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids. Pascal was in poor health throughout his life and his death came just two months after his 39th birthday.  (Source: Wikipedia)