ABSTRACT
Great mathematicians are often as interesting as their best results. This chapter begins with some background on the man for whom the famous arithmetic triangle is named. Blaise Pascal was home-schooled by his father, Etienne Pascal, a lawyer who had some strange ideas. He thought that Blaise shouldn’t study any mathematics until he was 15. Free of restrictions, Blaise Pascal progressed quickly, inventing the world’s first digital calculator when he was 18. It was called the Pascaline and resembled a mechanical calculator of the 1940s. “Digital” in this instance simply means that it used the digits 0 through 9. Blaise Pascal was not the first to discover this wonderful triangle of numbers, nor was it his father, Etienne. It predates both of these men by centuries. Pascal did important work in other areas of mathematics, and his contributions to the founding of probability are examined.
