Britannica
Sources used in this answer
Which mathematical operations could the Pascaline perform?
Created from Britannica articles
using AI.
AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal, oil painting by an anonymous artist, c. 1650; in the Musée Carnavalet–Histoire de Paris, Paris. Pascal laid the foundation for probability theory.
The Pascaline, designed by the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, was limited to performing two specific mathematical operations: addition and subtraction.12
Numbers were entered into the device by manually manipulating its dials. While later inventions, such as the Step Reckoner and the Arithmometer, expanded these capabilities to include multiplication and division, the Pascaline remained strictly an adding machine.12