Q 01/05

In which French city was Blaise Pascal born in 1623?

A) Rouen in Normandy

B) Clermont-Ferrand

C) Montpellier

D) Strasbourg

Answer · why

B) Clermont-Ferrand

His mother Antoinette Begon died when he was three, and in 1631 his father moved the family to Paris.

Q 02/05

What was the profession of Pascal's father Étienne when he took the family to Rouen in 1639?

A) A royal physician

B) A cathedral canon

C) The king's commissioner of taxes

D) A university professor

Answer · why

C) The king's commissioner of taxes

Étienne, an amateur mathematician and judge, decided to educate his children himself and never remarried.

Q 03/05

At 12, Pascal rediscovered the first 32 propositions of which work on his own?

A) Ptolemy's Almagest

B) Archimedes' On the Sphere

C) Apollonius' Conics

D) Euclid's Elements

Answer · why

D) Euclid's Elements

His father had tried to keep him from mathematics; after this he was given a copy of the book.

Q 04/05

Pascal's Essay on Conics, written at 16, proved a theorem about a hexagon in a conic. What did he call it?

A) The Golden Hexagon

B) The Mystic Hexagram

C) The Sacred Sextet

D) The Divine Figure

Answer · why

B) 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 05/05

Which philosopher was so unconvinced by the teenage Pascal's conics essay that he assumed his father wrote it?

A) Pierre Gassendi

B) Thomas Hobbes

C) René Descartes

D) Marin Mersenne

Answer · why

C) René Descartes

Told otherwise by Mersenne, he grudgingly allowed that the demonstrations were better than the ancients' but that other matters 'would scarcely occur ...