History of the Pasch Family

While the Pasch name is not a household name, it has included individuals that have made many contributions. Throughout history, the Pasch family has significantly contributed to art in Sweden, influenced mathematics, and invented the safety match. The current generation of Pasch's includes Anne-lise, a cyberwriter (online poetry and shortstories); Steve, the lead singer of the Christian rock band "Three Crosses"; and another inventor (O.K., my inventions won't exactly set the world on fire). My search for the history of the Pasch family continues.

The Pasch name has its origins in christianity. During the first three centuries of the Church, Pasch referred to the fesitval in celebration of Christ's passion and death. The Romance languages later used the Hebrew-Greek-Latin root for theid words denoting Easter: Italian [Pasqua], Spanish [Pascua], and French [Pasques]. Even non-Romance languages employ this same root: Scotch [Pask], Dutch [Paschen], Swedish [Pask], and the German lower Rhine dialect [Paisken].

Famous Pasch's

The Pasch family arrived in Sweden from Lubeck, Germany at the end of the 1600's [1].

• Lorens the Elder (1702-1766) Portrait-Painter

  His early portraits characterized effectively arrangements in the late English Baroque style. He was for a few years, the leading portrait-painter in Stockholm.

• Johan (1706-1769) Painter

  From 1735, he was engaged in the decoration of the Stockholm castle. He was well known for the introduction of the French Rococco style to the Swedish decorative painting and artistic handicraft.

• Lorens the Younger (1733-1805) Son of Lorens the Elder, Portrait-Painter

  From 1793, he was the Director for the Academy of Art. He was a student of Pilo in Copenhagen and Boucher and Roslin in Paris. He arrived home in 1766 and was a fashionable portrait-painter. With good psychological understanding and pleasant cool coloring, his paintings described the court and aristocracy.

• Ulrika (1735-1796) Sister of Lorens the Younger, Portrait-Painter.

  Her painting was first influenced by her father and later by her brother's style.

• Gustav Erik (1788-1862) Chemist

  In 1844 he invented and patented the safety match. He replaced the hazardous yellow phosphorus found in the matches of that period with red phosphorus and put it on the striking surface instead of the match head [2].

• Moritz Pasch (8 Nov 1843 - 20 Sept 1930) Mathmatician

  He was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). He studied in Berlin and then taught in Giessen. He worked on the foundations of geometry. He found a number of assumptions in Euclid that nobody had noticed before. He died in Bad Homburg, Germany.

  Pasch's Axiom is that is a line enters a triangle ABC through the side AB and does not pass through C then it must leave the triangle either between B and C or between C and A. Pasch argued in 1882 that geometers rely too heavily on physical intuition. In his view an argument in mathematics should not depend on the physical interpretation of the terms involved but upon purely formal axioms.

  Pasch claimed that the principle of duality contradicted physical intuition about points and lines, nobody believed that these terms were interchangeable. Hilbert was to be influenced by these ideas of Pasch [3].

1. from a Swedish Encycolpedia
2. http://www.si.se/english/factsheets/inventio.html
3. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and-ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pasch.html
   1. Dictionary of Scientific Biography
   2. Moritz Pasch, Jahresberichte der Deutschen Mathematiker vereinigung