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Blaise Pascal (pronounced [blɛz paskal]), (June 19, 1623 – August 19, 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a civil servant. Anders Hald writes, "To lighten his father's work as a tax official, Pascal invented a calculating machine for addition and subtraction and took care of its construction and sale." Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators, the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defence of the scientific method.
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