The history of criticism, particularly in the 19th century, has tended to portray Pascal as an author who was the victim of serious intellectual and medical disorders, as evidenced by the appearance of the manuscript of his Pensées (owned by the BNF). An examination of this manuscript leads to different conclusions, both literary and psychological.
Pascal’s law had an enormous impact on material science and engineering. The law states that a change in pressure at any point in an enclosed incompressible fluid at rest is transmitted undiminished to all points in the fluid. The pressure, defined as the amount of force that is exerted per unit area, is in the International System of Units (SI) expressed in Pascal (Pa), which is equivalent to...
The Pascaline is often hailed as the oldest surviving mechanical calculator, and the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden proudly holds the largest of the extant machines by Blaise Pascal. Starting from an analysis and visualization of this machine, the talk moves to consider earlier analog calculators, in particular planetary automata designed to represent the real-time, ‘true’...
“Piz Daint” is our flagship supercomputer system at CSCS. The current instance was introduced in 2017 and includes five thousand computing nodes accelerated with general purpose graphic processing units (GPGPU) NVIDIA dubbed “Pascal”. It has been the workhorse of our User Laboratory over the past decade, leading the way for Europe’s adoption of GPGPU in scientific computing.
While the...
