Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.

found the same height of quicksilver. Between 1658 and 1659 he wrote on the cycloid and its use in calculating the volume of solids. The University of Waterloo Ontario Canada holds an annual math contest named in his honour.

In 1646 he and his sister Jacqueline identified with the religious movement within Catholicism known by its detractors as Jansenism. His father died in 1651. He built 20 of these machines (called pascal's calculator and later pascaline) in the following ten years.