Blaise Pascal

Hello, I'm Blaise Pascal. I was born a very long time ago in a country called France. When I was a little boy, I did not play with toys as much as I played with numbers. I loved numbers. I thought they were so much fun. I also loved figuring out puzzles and seeing how things worked. It made me happy to solve a tricky problem all by myself.

My dad’s name was Étienne. He had a very important job where he had to add lots and lots of numbers all day long. It looked like hard work. I wanted to find a way to help him. So, around the year 1642, I had a big idea. I invented a special machine to help him count. I called it the Pascaline. It was a little box with spinning wheels inside. When you turned the wheels, it could add and subtract numbers all by itself, just like magic.

My ideas and inventions, like my special counting machine, were very helpful to many people for a long time. I lived to be 39 years old. Today, people remember me as someone who used a love of math to create amazing things that could help others. My counting machine was like a great-great-grandfather to the calculators and computers that we all use now.