Blaise Pascal

• He discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degress.
• He invented the syringe and hydraulic press.
• He worked on conic sections and produced important theorems in projective geometry. He also laid the foundation for the theory of probability.
• His Character was described as...
• • Precocious, subbornly persevering, a perfectionist, and pugnacious.
• Blaise's father taught him himself and decided that Blaise was not to study math until he was fifteen. By age 12 he had already started work on geometry independently.
• He worked on proving that vaccums existed despite discouragement from Descartes.
• Pascal had chronically poor health.
• Blaise underwent a religious experience after a near fatal carriage accident.
• He died at the age of 39 after a malignent growth in his stomach spread to his brain.

Howard Aiken

• He recieved his doctorate from Harvard, 1939.
• He was credited with the creation of the Mark I.
• • The machine could add, subtract, divide, and reference to previous results.
  • It was used by the U.S. Navy for gunnery and ballistic calculations.
  • The machine was 51ft. long, weighed 5 tons, and had 500 miles of wire.

John Atanasoff

• He was born October 4, 1903.
• He began independently studying math at age ten.
• He graduated from the University of Florida with a Bachelor's degree in Science in electrical engineering.
• In 1939, he built the world's first electronic digital computer.
• Because of the piracy of Atanasoff's ideas in the ENIAC, he was not given credit as the inventor of the electronic digital computer until 1972.
• He was a professor at Iowa State college.
• He recieved the Distinguished National Medal of Technology from President George Bush in 1990.
• He died June 15, 1995. He was ninety-one years old.

Charles Babbage

• He has a crater on the moon named for him.
• His brain was dissected after being preserved in alcohol for 37 years.
• He had a tolerance for heat. He was once baked in an oven at 265 degrees for five minutes without any great discomfort. He was also lowered into Mt. Vesuvius to see molten lava.
• He was a friend of Charles Dickens.
• He ran for parliament twice and lost.
• His other inventions included the cowcatcher, heliograph, standardized postal rate, and Greenwich time signals.
• He investigated Biblical miracles and wrote the book "Passages from the Life of a Philosopher."

John Louis von Neumann

• He was born December 28, 1903 in Budapest, Hungary.
• When he was six years old, he could divide eight-digit numbers in his head.
• He graduated from the University of Budapest with a degree in Chemical Engineering in 1925. He quickly gained a reputation in set theory, quantum mechanics and algebra.
• In 1933, he became a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, a position he kept for the rest of his life.
• During the war, von Neumann's expertise was used in the creation of mechanical devices used in the computation of weaponry.
• Through the report titled: First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, von Neumann introduced the basic elements of the stored program concept.
• In the 1950s, von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM.
• He died February 8, 1957.
• "If people do not believe that mathamatics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."