Pascal

Melvyn Bragg and his guests begin a new series of the programme with a discussion of the French polymath Blaise Pascal. Born in 1623, Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and scientist, inventing one of the first mechanical calculators and making important discoveries about fluids and vacuums while still a young man. In his thirties he experienced a religious conversion, after which he devoted most of his attention to philosophy and theology. Although he died in his late thirties, Pascal left a formidable legacy as a scientist and pioneer of probability theory, and as one of seventeenth century Europe’s greatest writers.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• David Wootton 16 episodes
  Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York
• Michael Moriarty No other episodes
  Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge
• Michela Massimi 4 episodes
  Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh

Reading list

• Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist and Thinker about God
  Donald Adamson (Palgrave Macmillan, 1994) Google Books →
• Pascal: 'Pensees', Critical Guides to French Texts
  John Cruickshank (Grant & Cutler, 1998) Google Books →
• The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern
  Keith Devlin (Basic Books, 2010) Google Books →
• The Cambridge Companion to Pascal
  Nicholas Hammond (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• Pascal (Past Masters)
  A. J. Krailsheimer (Oxford University Press, 1980) Google Books →
• Pensees
  Blaise Pascal (trans. A. J. Krailsheimer) (Penguin Classics, 1995) Google Books →
• Designing Experiments and Games of Chance: The Unconventional Science of Blaise Pascal
  William Shea (Science History Publications, 2008) Google Books →

Related episodes

• Pierre-Simon Laplace
  
  8 Apr, 2021 510 Mathematics
• Carl Friedrich Gauss
  
  30 Nov, 2017 510 Mathematics
• Emilie du Châtelet
  
  4 Feb, 2021 510 Mathematics
• Mathematics’ Unintended Consequences
  
  11 Feb, 2010 510 Mathematics
• Archimedes
  
  25 Jan, 2007 510 Mathematics
• Alan Turing
  
  15 Oct, 2020 510 Mathematics
• Calculus
  
  24 Sep, 2009 510 Mathematics
• Robert Boyle
  
  12 Jun, 2014 540 Chemistry
• The Poincaré Conjecture
  
  2 Nov, 2006 510 Mathematics
• Renaissance Maths
  
  2 Jun, 2005 510 Mathematics

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: b03b2v6m

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03b2v6m

Auto-category: 510.92 (Biography of mathematicians and scientists)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. The first practical calculating machine was invented in 1642 by the 19-year-old son of a tax inspector who wanted to find a way to make his father's job easier.