Blaise Pascal

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Mathematical and Scientific Discoveries

Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623 - August 19, 1662) was a French inventor, physicist, and mathematician who went on to make several discoveries in both mathematics and physics. Pascal's earliest work was in natural and applied sciences, where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, as well as better explaining the ideas of pressure and vacuum. In his teenage years, Pascal started working on calculating machines. Over the course of several years, he developed fifty prototypes, and completely built twenty finished machines. These machines were called Pascal's calculators and established him as one of the first inventors of the mechanical calculator. These machines were capable of addition and subtraction, and even though they failed in becoming a commercial success, they were catalysts in the next 400 years of development of mechanical methods of calculation. His most well known mathematical contribution is what people refer to as Pascal's Triangle. This "triangle" refers to Pascal's 1653 "Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle" which describes a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients.

This shows that if you add the two numbers directly above each spot of the next row, the values you get are the order of every coefficient for each increasing degree equation.

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where p is the momentum of the system and F is the net force from the surroundings.

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