Blaise Pascal Trivia
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49 free Blaise Pascal trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Blaise Pascal trivia quiz covers the French prodigy who was a mathematician, physicist, inventor and religious writer before dying at 39. The early questions deal with his birth in Clermont-Ferrand, the father who tried to keep him from mathematics, the Euclid propositions he rediscovered on a tile floor at 12, the conics essay that made Descartes doubt a teenager could have written it, and the calculating machine he built to help with his father's tax work. The middle of the quiz turns to the science and mathematics: the correspondence with Fermat that founded probability theory, the arithmetical triangle and the principle of induction, the cycloid contest, the barometer carried up the Puy de Dôme, the barrel experiment, the hydraulic press and syringe, and the SI unit that bears his name. It then follows his religious turn: Jansenism, his sister Jacqueline and Port-Royal, the 'Fire' memorial sewn into his coat, the Provincial Letters that Louis XIV ordered burned, the Pensées and the wager. The last questions cover his invention of public transport, his death and autopsy, and the programming language, chairs and university named after him. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on Pascal, the Pascaline, Pascal's wager, Pascal's triangle and the pascal unit.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which French city was Blaise Pascal born in 1623?
Clermont-Ferrand
Clermont-Ferrand. His father, a local judge, later left the town for Paris so that he could educate his gifted children himself.
Q 02In 1970 Niklaus Wirth honoured Pascal by giving his name to a new what?
Programming language
Programming language. Wirth built Pascal to teach students tidy, structured programming, and it became a staple of university computing courses.
Q 03By his sister's account, the 12-year-old Pascal secretly worked out geometry proofs matching those of which ancient text?
Euclid's Elements
Euclid's Elements. His father had kept mathematics from him until his languages were mastered, but on catching the boy drawing proofs in charcoal on the floor tiles he relented and gave him the book.
Q 04What did the 16-year-old Pascal call the six-point figure at the heart of his Essay on Conics?
The Mystic Hexagram
The Mystic Hexagram. Join any six points on a conic into a hexagon and its three pairs of opposite sides meet on one straight line, a result from which he said he drew some 400 corollaries.
Q 05Which philosopher shrugged off the teenage Pascal's conics essay, judging before reading half that its ideas were borrowed?
René Descartes
René Descartes. He wrote to Mersenne that the boy had plainly learned it from an older geometer, a cool response to an essay admirers were calling the strongest work since Archimedes.
Q 06Why did the young Pascal build his mechanical calculator in 1642?
To ease his father's tax calculations
To ease his father's tax calculations. French money was not decimal, so some of the machine's wheels had to count in twelves and twenties rather than tens.
Q 07When a digit on Pascal's calculator rolled past 9, what did the machine do unaided?
Carried one to the next wheel
Carried one to the next wheel. Pascal used small falling weights he called sautoirs, so a whole row of nines could roll over in a ripple without extra effort from the user.
Q 08Why did the Pascaline fail commercially?
It was extraordinarily expensive and cumbersome
It was extraordinarily expensive and cumbersome. From 1649 Pascal held a royal monopoly on making calculating machines in France, yet few were ever sold.
Q 09Two decades before Pascal's calculator, Wilhelm Schickard sketched a 'calculating clock' in letters to which astronomer?
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler. One of his biographers, Franz Hammer, publicised the letters in 1957; until then Pascal had been celebrated for three centuries as the inventor of the mechanical calculator.
Q 10With which mathematician did Pascal correspond in 1654, founding probability theory?
Pierre de Fermat
Pierre de Fermat. Their letters worked out how two gamblers should split the stakes of an unfinished game, and the idea of expected value grew out of the answer.
Q 11Which gambling friend's puzzles set Pascal writing the 1654 letters that founded probability theory?
The Chevalier de Méré
The Chevalier de Méré. Born Antoine Gombaud, the soldier, author and gamester wanted to know how two players who quit a game early should share the pot.
Q 12Who published the first book on probability after hearing in Paris of Pascal's 1654 letters on games of chance?
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens. The young Dutchman visited Paris in 1655, learned of the problems, solved them his own way at home and printed a short treatise on games of chance two years later.
Q 13What did Pascal call the tabular arrangement of binomial coefficients that now bears his name?
Q 21What allegedly happened when Pascal filled a thin tube attached to a water cask to a great height?
The barrel leaked
The barrel leaked. Other tellings have it burst outright; either way, a tall thin tube holding only a little water was enough to split a full cask.
Q 22Which two devices is Pascal credited with inventing through his work on fluids?
The hydraulic press and the syringe
The hydraulic press and the syringe. The press multiplies force, turning a light push on a small piston into a heavy one on a large piston, the idea that carries his name in physics.
Q 23The pascal, the SI unit of pressure, is defined as what?
The arithmetical triangle
The arithmetical triangle. He applied it to the question of how the stakes of an unfinished game should be divided, proving its rules with an early explicit use of mathematical induction.
Q 14In Iran, Pascal's triangle is named after which Persian mathematician, who described it centuries earlier?
Omar Khayyam
Omar Khayyam. China calls the same array Yang Hui's triangle and Italy calls it Tartaglia's, because all three men set it out long before Pascal was born.
Q 15What ailment did Pascal take as a heavenly sign to proceed with his 1658 study of the cycloid?
A toothache that vanished
A toothache that vanished. He had given up mathematics for religion four years earlier, yet eight days of work later he had solved the curve's problems and set Europe's mathematicians a prize challenge.
Q 16Which English architect sent Pascal a proof of the cycloid's exact length during his 1658 prize challenge?
Christopher Wren
Christopher Wren. Years before he rebuilt St Paul's he was a professor of astronomy in London, and his proof, the first to be published, gave the exact length of a cycloid's arch.
Q 17Whose barometer experiments, involving a tube of mercury inverted in a bowl, did Pascal build on in 1647?
Evangelista Torricelli
Evangelista Torricelli. Galileo's former pupil was explaining a pump-makers' puzzle, why suction would not lift water much beyond ten metres, and he blamed the weight of the air.
Q 18What did Pascal's 1647 work argue filled the space above the mercury in a barometer tube?
A vacuum
A vacuum. A Jesuit critic, Père Noël, insisted the gap must hold some subtle matter, and Pascal answered that a single contrary observation is enough to sink a hypothesis.
Q 19Which mountain did Pascal's brother-in-law climb with a barometer in 1648 to test air pressure?
Puy de Dôme
Puy de Dôme. Too ill to climb, Pascal had Florin Périer leave one mercury tube with a friar in the town below and carry another to the summit, where the column stood clearly lower.
Q 20Pascal's law says that pressure applied to a confined fluid is passed on in what way?
Equally in every direction
Equally in every direction. A rise in pressure at one point is matched undiminished at every other point of the fluid, the principle behind the brakes of cars and aircraft.
One newton per square metre
One newton per square metre. That is a very small pressure: ordinary air at sea level presses with about 101,000 pascals, so everyday readings come in multiples of a hundred or a thousand.
Q 24Weather forecasters adopted the hectopascal because it exactly equals which older pressure unit?
Millibar
Millibar. When science moved to the pascal, meteorologists wanted to keep the numbers they were used to, so they simply attached the prefix hecto, meaning a hundred.
Q 25A popular but unproven story credits Pascal's hunt for perpetual motion with inventing which casino game?
Roulette
Roulette. The game is first recorded in France decades after his death; the 'roulette' Pascal really did write about was his own name for the cycloid curve.
Q 26Which Catholic movement, named by its detractors, did Pascal and sister Jacqueline join in 1646?
Jansenism
Jansenism. Two bonesetter brothers spent three months with the family mending his father's fall on the ice, shared their strict faith, and Blaise was the first to be won over.
Q 27Which convent did Jacqueline Pascal enter as a postulant in 1652, over her brother's objections?
Port-Royal
Port-Royal. Blaise pleaded with her not to go, yet three years later, after his own conversion, he was making retreats at the same convent.
Q 28After noting the date, Pascal's record of his religious experience of 23 November 1654 opens with which single word?
Fire
Fire. He sewed the note into the lining of his coat and moved it whenever he changed clothes; nobody knew of it until a servant came across it after his death.
Q 29What Jesuit-favoured ethical method did the Provincial Letters attack as reasoning that excused moral laxity?
Casuistry
Casuistry. Pascal made his case by quoting the Jesuits' own handbooks back at them, above all Antonio Escobar's, turning dry case-by-case rulings into comedy.
Q 30In what state did Pascal leave the Pensées when he died in 1662?
As bundles of unfinished notes
As bundles of unfinished notes. They were raw material for a book defending Christianity, and editors have disagreed ever since about the order in which the fragments should be read.