Roulette's Inventor: A mystery resolved and a myth debunked

The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal has been attributed with the invention of the Roulette wheel. This myth appears in a large number of printed books and is cited countless times on the web including Wikipedia. We have looked into this mystery in the past and have been completely unable to discover any compelling evidence to back up this claim. We have now made a breakthrough in our research and we can now explain the reasons for this misunderstanding.

During his short lifetime Blaise Pascal was responsible for many advances in science, mathematics and philosophy. On of the areas to which he devoted considerable effort in his later years was the cycloid.

A cycloid is curve that is traced by a point on the circumference of a circle as it rolls along a straight line. It is a curve that rolls along another curve. This type of curve held a fascination with mathematicians for many hundreds of years and was initially studied by Galileo and Mersenne to be followed by such greats as Newton, Fermat, Bernoulli and Descartes to name just a few. Pascal did not study these curves until a few years before his death, and even then it was only for a few months.

Following a life changing experience Pascal had abandoned mathematics to devote his life to theology and religion. In this somewhat meditative phase of his life he had several philosophical insights and is thought by some people to have been the originator of existentialism. He made a temporary return to mathematics to study cycloid problems and after some intensive work published his results.

Are you getting warm? Does a circle rotating on another curve give you any pause for thought?

The title of Pascal's publication was "Histoire de la Roulette, appelé autrement Trochoide ou Cycloide" which translates to History of Roulette, alternatively called Trichoidal or Cycloid.

So our little mystery is solved PASCAL did NOT invent roulette. He wrote a mathematical paper about curves: Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

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