> " "Look at that!" said the number devil.[…] "Let's carry on stacking the cubes. Each new stone always sits over the join between the two below it, just as masons lay bricks." […] And they continued until the triangle was complete. […] The number devil climbed up one side of the triangle and wrote a "1" on the cube at the top. […] "On each cube, we always write the result of adding the numbers above it.
> – "Child's play," said Pierre. "
Like Pierre, the child haunted in his dreams by the "number devil," so vividly described by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in the book of that name (Le Seuil/Métaillé, 1998), we shall journey from one discovery to the next through the heart of Pascal's triangle.
Countless numerical patterns
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