BLAISE PASCAL (1623 - 1662)

Blaise Pascal was born on June 19, 1623 at Clermont, and died on Aug. 19, 1662 at Paris.

The arithmetic triangle was first discovered in a Chinese version in 1303. In 1654, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat used the arithmetic triangle, which is now known as Pascal's Triangle, to develop the foundations of probability theory. The format of Pascal's Triangle is most famous for the (1+x)ⁿ polynomial expansion. Colour coding the coefficients in Pascal's Triangle led to a variety of patterns, such as the self-similar Sierpinski's Triangle. Patterns in Pascal's Triangle can also be written using a cellular automaton, a set of rules that plays like a game. Nonetheless, we can just as easily form the patterns using iterated function systems, IFS. Hence, the three most important approaches to explain the pattern in Pascal's Triangle are: number theory, cellular automaton, and IFS.