# The adolescent Essai pour les coniques circulates as a printed geometric paper

Date: 1640

## The fact

Around 1640 [Pascal](/people/blaise-pascal) issued an Essai pour les coniques, a short printed paper on projective properties of conic sections associated with Desargues. He was a teenager.

## Context

A youthful geometry paper is a knowledge-access path. Later probability is a different instrument.

Blaise Pascal is not the sole author of every later object, law, or museum label that uses the name. Shared work with courts, excavators, printers, spouses, officials, and later states does not erase a documented role, and it does not make an ancient person the signer of a twentieth-century statute.

## Evidence and sources

Official or museum/library pages and an independent publisher independently describe this instrument.

Official or archival record: MacTutor — Blaise Pascal (https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Pascal/; University of St Andrews).

## Significance

Printed projective geometry is an education path. High confidence on the paper’s existence in the received bibliography.

Printed projective geometry is an education path. High confidence on the paper’s existence in the received bibliography.

## What is established and what is not

Established as a dated public record of this instrument.

What would change the picture: a contradictory original with a different date or name, or a measured series that can be argued, with lag and alternatives, as a consequence of this instrument rather than of later institutions.

The date is the date of this instrument, not a licence to back-date every later harm or benefit.
Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The attached driver is edu-[digital-learning-access](/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access). The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here. Later competitions, monuments, translations, UNESCO listings, and museums are not converted into extra lifetime acts. The welfare reading used in this dossier is improving. That reading is an impact-path choice, not a property stored on the Fact itself. Confidence is stated on the impact path. A later English edition is not a recovered autograph. If a number is not in the two records named above, it is not supplied here.

## People

- Blaise Pascal: https://factrail.ai/people/blaise-pascal

## Drivers

- Digital Learning Access: https://factrail.ai/drivers/edu-digital-learning-access

## Sources

- https://data.bnf.fr/en/11918679/blaise_pascal/
- https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Pascal/

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/facts/pa-essai-coniques-1640