461Blaise Pascal was the middle child of an upper-class magistrate in Clermont-
Ferrand, France. His mother died when he was 3 years old, and five years later
Pascal’s father moved the family to Paris. His father, Etienne, an excellent amateur
mathematician, educated young Blaise at home. Etienne first taught Blaise Latin and
Greek, deciding to wait on his own love, mathematics, until his son was older. By the
age of 12, however, Blaise had figured out many of the principles of Euclidian geom-
etry on his own. His father finally relented and bought Blaise a copy of Euclid, which
he devoured. Over the next several years, father and son attended weekly mathemat-
ical lectures and were regular guests at important intellectual salons in Paris. In 1638,
the family underwent another trauma when Etienne Pascal was forced to flee Paris
because of a conflict with the powerful Cardinal Richelieu. However, Blaise Pascal’s
younger sister, Jacqueline, performed so well in a children’s play for the Cardinal
that their father was given a pardon and installed as tax commissioner for Rouen.
At Rouen, Blaise Pascal began to concentrate on mathematics. While still a
teenager, he wrote his first book (on conic sections in geometry) and developed a
plan for a calculating machine to help his father with his tax work. In 1644, he built
the first of the machine’s several working models—no small feat given the state of
metalworking at the time. Pascal’s contributions to mathematics and computing
machines were so important that a major contemporary programming language is
named in his honor. Pascal also experimented on the nature of a vacuum showing
that, contrary to Aristotle’s belief, “Nature has no abhorrence of a vacuum.”
In 1647, Pascal became seriously ill and returned to Paris with his younger sister
to recover. Following his father’s death in 1651, his sister entered a convent, leaving
Pascal alone. Over the next several years, Pascal seemed to drift: he outwardly
enjoyed the social life of Paris as a successful mathematician and eligible bachelor,
but he was inwardly dissatisfied. Although he had undergone a conversion in 1646BLAISE PASCAL
1623–1662