Blaise Pascal Timeline

Pascal presented the first mechanical calculator to Christina, Queen of Sweden in 1632, demonstrating his pioneering work on calculating machines.

Image source: Pascal's calculator

To ease his father's exhausting tax calculations, Pascal, not yet 19, constructed a mechanical calculator capable of addition and subtraction, called Pascal's calculator or the Pascaline. This established him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.

In 1654, Pascal proved Pascal's identity relating the sums of the p-th powers of the first n positive integers for p = 0, 1, 2, ..., k, an important result in mathematics.

Written in 1654 but published posthumously in 1665, Pascal's Traité du triangle arithmétique described a tabular presentation for binomial coefficients which he called the arithmetical triangle, now known as Pascal's triangle.

Image source: Pascal's triangle

In 1654, prompted by his friend the Chevalier de Méré, Pascal corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on gambling problems, and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of probability.

Image source: Probability

In 1658, while suffering from a toothache, Pascal began considering several problems concerning the cycloid, leading to significant mathematical results.

Image source: Cycloid

Between 1658 and 1659, Pascal wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids, contributing important results to geometry.

In 1646, Pascal and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism, beginning his deep engagement with religion.

Image source: Jansenism

Pascal fell away from his initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what some biographers have called his worldly period (1648–54).

In early June 1653, after endless badgering from Jacqueline, Pascal formally signed over the whole of his sister's inheritance to Port-Royal, which to him 'had begun to smell like a cult'.

Image source: Port-Royal-des-Champs

During visits to his sister at Port-Royal in 1654, Pascal displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not yet drawn to God.

On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious experience and immediately wrote a brief note to himself which began: 'Fire.' This marked the start of his influential works on philosophy and theology.

His belief and religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655.

Beginning in 1656–57, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, an ethical method used especially by Jesuits. The 18-letter series was published under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV.

Image source: Lettres provinciales

The final letter from Pascal, in 1657, had defied Pope Alexander VII himself, escalating the controversy surrounding his writings against casuistry.

Outraged by the Lettres provinciales, King Louis XIV ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in 1660.

In 1661, amid the formulary controversy, the Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved had to sign a 1656 papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. Louis XIV also suppressed the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal that year.

In 1647, following more experimentation, Pascal produced Experiences nouvelles touchant le vide, which detailed basic rules describing to what degree various liquids could be supported by air pressure.

Following Torricelli and Galileo Galilei, in 1647 Pascal rebutted Aristotle and Descartes, who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum, advancing the scientific understanding of air pressure.

By 1647, Pascal had learned of Evangelista Torricelli's experimentation with barometers, which inspired his own investigations into atmospheric pressure and the vacuum.

Image source: Evangelista Torricelli

This work was followed by Récit de la grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs, published in 1648, further developing Pascal's findings on atmospheric pressure and liquids.

On 19 September 1648, after many months of Pascal's friendly but insistent prodding, Florin Périer, husband of Pascal's elder sister Gilberte, carried out the fact-finding mission vital to Pascal's theory on the vacuum.

Shortly before his death, Pascal established the carrosses à cinq sols, the first modern public transport service, earning him credit as the inventor of modern public transportation. The lines were not commercially successful, and the last one closed by 1675.

Image source: Carrosses à cinq sols

The first version of the numerous scraps of paper found after Pascal's death appeared in print as a book in 1669 titled Pensées de M., one of the most influential works of philosophy and theology.

Image source: Pensées

The 1969 Eric Rohmer film My Night at Maud's is based on the work of Pascal, reflecting his enduring influence on philosophy and culture.

Image source: My Night at Maud's

Roberto Rossellini directed a filmed biopic, Blaise Pascal, which originally aired on Italian television in 1971.

Pascal was a subject of the first edition of the 1984 BBC Two documentary Sea of Faith, presented by Don Cupitt.

Pascal influenced both French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who named his Pascalian Meditations (1997) after him, and French philosopher Louis Althusser.

Image source: Pierre Bourdieu

In 2014, Nvidia announced its new Pascal microarchitecture, named in honor of Blaise Pascal.

The first graphics cards featuring Nvidia's Pascal architecture were released in 2016, bringing Pascal's name into modern computing.

The 2017 game Nier: Automata has multiple characters named after famous philosophers, including a sentient pacifistic machine named Pascal who serves as a major supporting character.

Image source: Nier: Automata

In 2023, Pope Francis released an apostolic letter, Sublimitas et miseria hominis, dedicated to Blaise Pascal, in commemoration of the fourth centenary of his birth.