Blaise Pascal, his discoveries and the sculpture by Augustin Pajou in Clermont-Ferrand

Blaise Pascal, the outstanding French inventor, mathematician, thinker and, in many respects, altogether advanced man. Sculpture by Augustin Pajou, housed at the University of Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand. Pascal is known for a number of mathematical and physical discoveries with which we become acquainted as early as school: Pascal's law on pressure in liquids and gases, the infinite Pascal's triangle and decision theory, Pascal's rule on binomial coefficients, Pascal's theorem on the hexagon inscribed in a circle, Pascal's conic section. While still a youth, Pascal invented the arithmometer, or pascaline, a mechanical calculating machine for addition: the year was in the 1600s. Finally, Pascal worked on a great treatise that demonstrated, in accessible terms, the existence of God. The marble Pascal gazes at one of his own drawings, which depicts yet another brilliant idea of the scholar: the description of the path of a nail in a cart wheel, from the start of its rise in rotation to its return to the ground, otherwise known as the roulette or cycloid