Hello Blaise Pascal, thank you for joining us today. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself and your background?

Certainly, Matei! I was born in 1623 in France. My father was a government official and a mathematician, so I grew up surrounded by numbers and equations. This early exposure sparked my interest in math and science, and I began exploring these subjects at a young age.

It sounds like you had a fascinating upbringing! When did you realize that you wanted to pursue a career in mathematics and physics?

I think it was a gradual realization. I was always drawn to puzzles and problems that required logical thinking, and as I learned more about math and science, I became increasingly fascinated by their applications to the world around me. It wasn't long before I knew that I wanted to dedicate my life to these fields.

That's really inspiring! Can you tell us about some of your early experiments or discoveries that paved the way for your later work?

One of my earliest experiments involved studying the vacuum. I conducted an experiment using a mercury barometer to demonstrate that air pressure decreases as you ascend to higher altitudes. This led me to develop Pascal's Principle, which states that pressure applied to a confined fluid is transmitted equally in all directions.

Fascinating! How did you come up with the idea for the Pascaline, and what impact did it have on the field of mathematics?

The Pascaline was inspired by my father's work as a tax collector. He often complained about the tediousness of manual calculations, so I set out to create a device that could perform arithmetic operations quickly and accurately. While the Pascaline was not widely adopted during my lifetime, it laid the groundwork for later mechanical calculators and computers, revolutionizing the field of mathematics and paving the way for modern computing.