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French mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont Ferrand on June 19th, 1623. Pascal was the son of judge Étienne Pascal, and Antoinette Bégon. At the tender age of four, Blaise Pascal lost his mother, who left behind two daughters. In attempts to nurture Pascal’s growing mind, Étienne quit his job at Clermont and moved the family to Paris. There, Blaise was home-schooled by his father who took it upon himself to enforce the studies of mathematics and science. Blaise Pascal showed great intellectual maturity at a young age, where at twelve, he had written proof that the sum of a triangle’s angle is equal to that of its two right angles.

From then on, Blaise Pascal gave great contribution to the mathematic world. In his written work “Traité du triangle arithmétique,” he presented his findings on binomial coefficients, which is now known as “Pascal’s Triangle.” Another work titled “Essai pour les coniques,” was Pascal’s introduction to the transformation of geometrical figures by conical or optical projection. This then went on to caption his theorem that three pairs of a hexagon’s opposite sides are collinear; which he coined “mystic hexagram.” Added on to this, Pascal deduced an astonishing 400 corollaries. Blaise was well educated in infinitesimal calculus, along with the embryonic form of Cavalieri’s method of indivisibles. Collaborating with Fermat, the duo formed the theory of probability and combinatorial analysis. Apart from his works in the mathematic field, Blaise Pascal was also an established philosopher.

Although the “Pascal Triangle” is widely associated with the mathematician, Blaise Pascal was not, in fact the individual who “invented” it. By analyzing relicts of past civilizations, it has been observed that in China, around 1261, the triangle was appeared to six rows in Yang Hui, granted to a man by the name of Jia Xiam. It has also been attested that the “Pascal Triangle” was known to Omar Khayyam, an Arab astronomer and mathematician as early as the ninth century.