On this day in 1623 French mathematician, physicist, inventor and theologian Blaise Pascal was born. A child prodigy, Pascal made many important contributions in the fields of natural and applied sciences, geometry, economics and social sciences from an early age. In 1642 while he was still a teenager Pascal started building calculating machines to help his father in his tax-collecting work. After three years of work and numerous prototypes, Pascal was able to build the Pascaline, one of the first mechanical calculators ever invented and one of the significant foundations of modern computing.
