500 Cinq Cents Francs Wenqin Weng

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Wenqin Weng
The man on the 500 Cinq Cents Francs banknote is Blaise Pascal. He is a famous French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian born in 1623.

As a mathematician, he is famous for his Pascal triangle and invention of mechanical calculator. When he was only sixteen years old, he created a new field of projected geometry, and later he corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, which strongly influenced the development of modern economics, especially in actuarial science. This is probably the main reason Blaise Pascal is on the 500 cinq cents francs banknote of 1991, as John Ross, a British economic commentator writes, "Probability theory and the discoveries following it changed the way we regard uncertainty, risk, decision-making, and an individual's and society's ability to influence the course of future events."

As a physicist, he is known for his experiment known as Pascal’s barrel. Facing criticism to his work, he responded by stating, “In order to show that a hypothesis is evident, it does not suffice that all the phenomena follow from it; instead, if it leads to something contrary to a single one of the phenomena, that suffices to establish its falsity.” This is one of the 17th century's major statements on the scientific method and influenced generations of scientists.

Besides the appearance on the banknote, his name was also given to the SI unit of pressure, to a programming language, and Pascal's law, which is an important principle of hydrostatics. We can see how important Pascal is, not only to France, but to the whole world.

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