19 June 1623: Mathematician Blaise Pascal born.
Unlike most of us, who, at age 13 are busy trying not to look stupid in front of the other kids at school, Blaise Pascal occupied most of his teenage years with elaborate forays into the sublteies of Euclidian geometry and Cartesian logic. Probably most famous for his work in geometry (he is credited with being the first to notice that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles), Pascal is also remembered for inventing a nifty primitive calculating computer called the pascaline, which, according to The Computer Museum “used a series of toothed wheels, which were turned by hand and which could handle numbers up to 999,999,999. Pascal’s device was also called the ‘numerical wheel calculator’ and was one of the world’s first adding machines.”
