Color enhanced portrait of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662),a French mathematician,physicist,inventor,writer,Catholic philosopher and child prodigy. He made important contributions to the study of fluids,and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum. While still a teenager,he started some pioneering work on calculating machines,and after three years of effort he invented the mechanical calculator. His Traite du triangle arithmetique ('Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle') of 1653 described a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients,now called Pascal's triangle. Prompted by a friend interested in gambling problems,he corresponded with Fermat on the subject,and from that collaboration was born the mathematical theory of |