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Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.

In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascal's calculators and later Pascalines) over the following ten years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.

Pressure (symbol: p or P) is the ratio of force to the area over which that force is distributed.

Pressure is force per unit area applied in a direction perpendicular to the surface of an object. Gauge pressure (also spelled gage pressure) is the pressure relative to the local atmospheric or ambient pressure. Pressure is measured in any unit of force divided by any unit of area. The SI unit of pressure is the newton per square metre, which is called the pascal (Pa) after the seventeenth-century philosopher and scientist Blaise Pascal. The lbf/square inch (PSI) is the traditional unit of pressure in US/UK customary units. A pressure of 1 Pa approximately equals the pressure exerted by a dollar bill resting flat on a table. Everyday pressures are often stated in kilopascals (1 kPa = 1000 Pa) – 1 kPa is approximately one-seventh of a lbf/in2.

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