Biography any four mathematicians pictures

Johanna Osthoff

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Minna Waldeck

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By Susan Corapi, Trinity International University, Deerfield, IL

Biographies are important for building interest in mathematics. By putting a human face on a field that students tend to see as abstract, biographies help young people see what people who study complex math are interested in and how they ask questions that drive their thinking and research.

When I talk with math majors, they often have difficulty seeing the potential for stories to be teaching tools–the sole exception being story problems that help one learn math. Part of the difficulty seems to lie in the fact that while books dealing with science, social studies and the arts are often inherently telling a larger story, it is hard to recognize a story in something as abstract as an algebraic expression or a geometrical theorem. While students may readily connect with Watson and Crick’s effort to describe the structure of DNA, Harriet Tubman’

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Quick Info

Born

19 June 1623
Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrand), Auvergne, France

Died

19 August 1662
Paris, France

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Summary

Blaise Pascal was a very influential French mathematician and philosopher who contributed to many areas of mathematics. He worked on conic sections and projective geometry and in correspondence with Fermat he laid the foundations for the theory of probability.

Biography

Blaise Pascal was the third of Étienne Pascal's children and his only son. Blaise's mother died when he was only three years old. In 1632 the Pascal family, Étienne and his four children, left Clermont and settled in Paris. Blaise Pascal's father had unorthodox educational views and decided to teach his son himself. Étienne Pascal decided that Blaise was not to study mathematics before the age of 15 and all mathematics texts were removed from their house. Blaise however, his curiosity raised by this, started to work on geometry himself at the age of 12. He discovered that t