Background and Early Life

Inventor, mathematician, physicist and theological writer Blaise Pascal, born on June
19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, was the third of four children and only son to
Etienne and Antoinette Pascal. His mother passed away when Blaise was just a toddler
and he became exceptionally close to his two sisters Gilberte and Jacqueline. His father,
Etienne, was a tax collector and talented mathematician.

Etienne moved the family to Paris in 1631. He had decided to educate Blaisea child
prodigyat home so he could design an unorthodox curriculum and make sure that
Blaise was able to express his own innate curiosity. It's also believed that Blaise may
have been educated at home due to issues around his health. Ironically, Etienne
omitted mathematics from his son's early curriculum out of concern that Blaise would
become so fascinated with geometry that he wouldnt be able to focus on classical
subjects.

The beginning of Blaises education was geared toward languages, especially Latin and
Greek. Even so, Etienne's plan backfired: The fact that mathematics was a forbidden
topic made the subject even more interesting to the inquisitive boy, who at the age of
12 began exploring geometry on his own. He made up his own terminology, not having
learned official mathematical terms, and quickly managed to work out that the sum of a
triangle's angles are equal to two right angles.
 .

Leonhard Euler was born on

April 15, 1707, in Basel, Switzerland. Though originally
slated for a career as a rural clergyman, Euler showed an
early aptitude and propensity for mathematics, and thus,
after studying with Johan Bernoulli, he attended the
University of Basel and earned his master's during his teens.
Moving to Russia in 1727, Euler served in the navy before

He wed Katharina Gsell in early 1734, with the couple going on to have many children,
though only five lived past their father. The couple were married for 39 years until
Katharina's death, and Euler remarried in his later years to her half-sister.

In 1736, he published his first book of many, Mechanica. By the end of the decade,
having suffered from fevers and overexertion due to cartography work, Euler was
severely hampered in the ability to see from his right eye.

The development of calculus was at the forefront of 18th century mathematical

research, and the Bernoullisfamily friends of Eulerwere responsible for much of the
early progress in the field. Understanding the infinite was the major focus of Euler's
research. While some of Euler's proofs may not have been acceptable under modern
standards of rigor, his ideas were responsible for many great advances. First of all,
Euler introduced the concept of a function, and introduced the use of the exponential
function and logarithms in analytic proofs

Euler frequently used the logarithmic functions as a tool in analysis problems, and
discovered new ways by which they could be used. He discovered ways to express
various logarithmic functions in terms of power series, and successfully defined
logarithms for complex and negative numbers, thus greatly expanding the scope where
logarithms could be applied in mathematics.
Projective Geometry is a branch of geometry dealing with the properties and invariants of
geometric figures under projection. At the age of 16, Blaise Pascal produced a short treatise
titled Essai pour les coniques (Essay on Conics) in the emerging field of projective geometry.
The essay includes what is now known as Pascals Theorem. It states that if a hexagon is
inscribed in a conic section then the three intersection points of opposite sides lie on a straight
line; referred to as the Pascal line. Pascals Theorem was his first important mathematical
discovery and a breakthrough contribution in the field of projective geometry.