{"id":7223,"date":"2016-08-20T09:48:40","date_gmt":"2016-08-20T09:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7223"},"modified":"2016-08-29T08:53:52","modified_gmt":"2016-08-29T08:53:52","slug":"calculating-blaise-pascal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=7223","title":{"rendered":"Calculating Blaise Pascal"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Blaise Pascal’s ‘Pascaline’. 1652. (Mus\u00e9e des Arts et M\u00e9tiers, Paris; source of image: Wikimedia Commons)<\/p><\/div>\n

The latest calendar to be added to the growing set of mathematical correspondences in EMLO is centred around the letters of a prodigy. Blaise Pascal<\/a> was introduced to Mersenne<\/a>\u2019s circle of Parisian savants when only in his mid-teens, at which point he was furthering significantly Girard Desargues\u2019s work on conic sections. Educated by his father Etienne Pascal<\/a>, himself a lawyer and amateur mathematician of exceptional talent, this young lad invented a calculating machine \u2014\u00a0the Pascaline \u2014 primarily to assist his father with tax calculations. He progressed to work on what became known as Pascal’s triangle, and and focused also on questions relating to the pressure of air, attempting to replicate Evangelista Torricelli<\/a>\u2019s experiments, as a result of which found himself in opposition to Descartes<\/a>, Pascal\u2019s life was altered irrevocably in 1646\u00a0following\u00a0an accident on ice that left his father with a broken leg. The temporary installment of two bonesetters, the Deschamp brothers, within the Pascal family home in Rouen set in motion the family\u2019s involvement with the Jansenist movement and resulted in one of Blaise’s\u00a0siblings, Jacqueline<\/a>, joining the Abbaye de Port-Royal des Champs<\/a>. From 1654, three years after his father’s death, Pascal\u00a0turned his attention to\u00a0religion. Les Lettres provinciales <\/em>were written and published in defence of\u00a0Antoine Arnauld<\/a>, an opponent of the Jesuits and a defender of Jansenism. Upon Blaise Pascal’s\u00a0death in 1662, the philosophical work for which he became\u00a0best known remained unfinished and was published subsequently as Pens\u00e9es<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This calendar of correspondence, based on metadata from an edition of\u00a0letters that was published in 1922, lists letters that span Pascal\u2019s adult life from 1943 until\u00a0shortly before his death. Each letter record in EMLO provides a link to the printed copy and we hope very much you set aside your summer-beach reading and dip into the world of Pascal. Should you find yourself with time to explore further, you might be interested to know that our developer, Mat Wilcoxson, has been working\u00a0to refine how we search and retrieve\u00a0thematic clusters of correspondences<\/a>\u00a0in the union catalogue and, as proof of concept, I’m\u00a0thrilled to be able to demonstrate that\u00a0we are able\u00a0now to summon\u00a0up together all the calendars of correspondence of the mathematicians<\/a>\u00a0listed currently in EMLO. Quite the formula for\u00a0beach combing indeed!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest calendar to be added to the growing set of mathematical correspondences in EMLO is centred around the letters of a prodigy. Blaise Pascal was introduced to Mersenne\u2019s circle of Parisian savants when only in his mid-teens, at which point he was furthering significantly Girard Desargues\u2019s work on conic sections. Educated by his father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7223\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}