RPC History Lesson 110

Hello! Here is what mr.Livingston told me to do today: Summarize each of the inventions you studied this week and how they impacted history. Also, explain the most interesting thing you learned this week, and why.

The four inventions I learned about (and one inventor) are : the Mersenne’s laws, the Cartesian Coordinates, the Mechanical calculator, and Blaise Pascal.

Mersenne’s laws are laws describing the frequency of oscillation of a stretched string or monochord, useful in musical tuning and musical instrument construction. The equation was first proposed by French mathematician and music theorist Marin Mersenne in his 1637 work Traité de l’harmonie universelle.

The coordinate system we commonly use is called the Cartesian system, after the French mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), who developed it in the 17th century. Legend has it that Descartes, who liked to stay in bed until late, was watching a fly on the ceiling from his bed!

The 17th century marked the beginning of the history of mechanical calculators, as it saw the invention of its first machines, including Pascal’s calculator, in 1642. Blaise Pascal had invented a machine which he presented as being able to perform computations that were previously thought to be only humanly possible.

Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, inventor, and theologian. In mathematics, he was an early pioneer in the fields of game theory and probability theory. In philosophy he was an early pioneer in existentialism. As a writer on theology and religion he was a defender of Christianity.

And that’s it!