50 free Blaise Pascal trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01In which French city was Blaise Pascal born in 1623?
Clermont-Ferrand
His mother Antoinette Begon died when he was three, and in 1631 his father moved the family to Paris.
Q 02What was the profession of Pascal's father Étienne when he took the family to Rouen in 1639?
The king's commissioner of taxes
Étienne, an amateur mathematician and judge, decided to educate his children himself and never remarried.
Q 03At 12, Pascal rediscovered the first 32 propositions of which work on his own?
Euclid's Elements
His father had tried to keep him from mathematics; after this he was given a copy of the book.
Q 04Pascal's Essay on Conics, written at 16, proved a theorem about a hexagon in a conic. What did he call it?
The Mystic Hexagram
The three intersection points of opposite sides lie on a line now called the Pascal line; the work followed the ideas of Desargues.
Q 05Which philosopher was so unconvinced by the teenage Pascal's conics essay that he assumed his father wrote it?
René Descartes
Told otherwise by Mersenne, he grudgingly allowed that the demonstrations were better than the ancients' but that other matters 'would scarcely occur to a 16-year-old child'.
Q 06Why did the young Pascal build his mechanical calculator in 1642?
To ease his father's tax calculations
He was not yet 19; the machine, later called the Pascaline, could add and subtract.
Q 07How many Pascalines are known to have survived?
Eight
Four are in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris and one in the Zwinger in Dresden; Pascal built about 20 finished machines over ten years.
Q 08Why did the Pascaline fail commercially?
It was extraordinarily expensive and cumbersome
It became little more than a toy and status symbol for the very rich across Europe.
Q 09Letters discovered in 1957 showed which German had drawn a working calculating clock twenty years before Pascal?
Wilhelm Schickard
He described it in letters to Kepler in 1623 and 1624, which is why Pascal is called one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.
Q 10With which mathematician did Pascal correspond in 1654, founding probability theory?
Pierre de Fermat
The problem was how two players stopping a game early should divide the stakes; the notion of expected value grew out of it.
Q 11Which gambling friend prompted the Pascal–Fermat correspondence?
The Chevalier de Méré
Huygens later learned of the subject from their letters and wrote the first book on probability.
Q 12Who wrote the first book on probability after learning of the subject from the Pascal–Fermat letters?
Christiaan Huygens
Pascal and Fermat did not develop the field far themselves; de Moivre and Laplace carried it on later.
Q 13What did Pascal call the tabular arrangement of binomial coefficients that now bears his name?
The arithmetical triangle
Q 21What allegedly happened when Pascal filled a thin tube attached to a water cask to a great height?
The barrel leaked
It demonstrated that hydrostatic pressure depends on height difference, not on the weight of fluid.
Q 22Which two devices are listed among Pascal's inventions in fluid mechanics?
The hydraulic press and the syringe
He proved that hydrostatic pressure depends on elevation difference rather than the weight of the fluid.
Q 23The pascal, the SI unit of pressure, is defined as what?
One newton per square metre
His treatise on it was written in 1654 but published only in 1665, and it also contains an explicit statement of mathematical induction.
Q 14In China the triangle is named after which 13th-century mathematician?
Yang Hui
In Iran it is Khayyam's triangle and in Italy Tartaglia's triangle, after the algebraist who published six rows in 1556.
Q 15What ailment did Pascal take as a heavenly sign to proceed with his 1658 study of the cycloid?
A toothache that vanished
He finished his essay eight days later and announced a contest with prizes of 20 and 40 Spanish doubloons.
Q 16Which English architect sent Pascal a proof of the rectification of the cycloid during his contest?
Christopher Wren
Wallis published the proof crediting Wren, giving him priority; neither contest entry was judged adequate.
Q 17Whose barometer experiments, involving a tube of mercury inverted in a bowl, did Pascal build on in 1647?
Evangelista Torricelli
Most scientists, including Descartes, still held that 'nature abhors a vacuum' and that an invisible plenum filled all space.
Q 18What did Pascal's 1647 work argue filled the space above the mercury in a barometer tube?
A vacuum
Descartes and the Aristotelians insisted on a plenum; Pascal replied that a hypothesis contradicted by a single phenomenon is thereby falsified.
Q 19Which mountain did Pascal's brother-in-law climb with a barometer in 1648 to test air pressure?
Puy de Dôme
Pascal was too ill to climb it himself; Florin Périer found the mercury 26 inches high in town and only about 23 inches at the 1,460 m summit.
Q 20Pascal repeated the altitude experiment in Paris by carrying a barometer up which building?
The bell tower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie
The 50-metre climb dropped the mercury by two lines; he concluded that every seven fathoms of ascent lowered it by half a line.
Weather reports use hectopascals, and standard sea-level pressure is about 1,013 hPa.
Q 24In which year did the General Conference on Weights and Measures adopt the name pascal for the SI pressure unit?
1971
One hectopascal equals one millibar and one kilopascal equals one centibar.
Q 25Pascal introduced a primitive form of which casino game while searching for a perpetual motion machine?
Roulette
The wheel was a by-product of his tinkering; his more lasting gambling legacy was probability theory.
Q 26Which Catholic movement, named by its detractors, did Pascal and sister Jacqueline join in 1646?
Jansenism
The Provincial Letters later attacked the Jesuits on the Jansenists' behalf, and Louis XIV suppressed the movement at Port-Royal in 1661.
Q 27Which convent did Jacqueline Pascal enter as a postulant in 1652, over her brother's objections?
Port-Royal
Blaise feared abandonment as much as anything; she signed over her inheritance in return for a stipend.
Q 28Pascal's note recording his religious experience of 23 November 1654 begins with what word?
Fire
He sewed the 'Memorial' into his coat and moved it whenever he changed clothes; a servant found it by chance after his death.
Q 29Under what pseudonym did Pascal publish the Provincial Letters in 1656–57?
Louis de Montalte
The 18 letters attacked Jesuit casuistry and so incensed Louis XIV that he ordered the book shredded and burned.
Q 30What Jesuit-favoured ethical method did the Provincial Letters attack as reasoning that excused moral laxity?
Casuistry
Their humour and satire influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, and they contain Pascal's apology for writing a long letter because he lacked time to write a short one.