The Life Of Rene Descartes
Rene' Descartes was a French mathematician, philosopher and anatomist.
He
contributed a great deal to modern ideas , particularly those concerned
with geometry. He
was known in his time as a mechanist, because he believed
that nature could be
explained through rational means, and inherent patterns
could be found. During his life,
Descartes remade geometry and made
modern geometry possible.
Rene' Descartes was born on March, 31 1596 in
La Haye, Touraine, which was a
former province of France. Rene' Descartes was
the third child of a wealthy French
family. Because of his father's poor
health, Rene' did as he pleased. At the age of eight,
Rene' was sent to a
Jesuit college for formal schooling in the classics. The teacher of
the
school was sensitive to Rene's health and allowed him to stay in bed
until he felt ready to
attend class. Descartes used the quiet morning to
think, and in later life he said they were
the real source of his mathematics
and philosophy. At the age of 18, Rene' left school to
begin leading the life
of a gentleman in Paris. He found partying amusing for a while.
Soon
after, he joined the army and went on to fight in a war in Germany. In
Germany,
Rene' had the most remarkable dream in the history of Math. He
reported a number of
episodes in the dream, and one of them is usually
believed to be the application of
algebra to geometry and the beginning of
analytic and coordinate geometry. Descartes
remained a soldier for another 2
years and then retired to Paris.
Until then Descartes had published
nothing, but he had shared his discoveries
with others earlier. One of
Descartes' friends convinced him that he had a sacred duty to
share them with
the world in writing.. Soon after he went to Holland to write and
think.
He spent the next 20 years roaming around Holland and working with
the brightest minds
in Europe. His father was the only person who knew his
whereabouts. In 1637, Rene'
Descartes' book, Le Monde, was published. A
few theologians condemned his work but
nothing happened.
Descartes was
still in Holland happily gardening when, thinking and writing when
19
year old Queen Christina of Sweden decided that she must have him as a tutor
in
Mathematics. She sent a ship to fetch him to the court, but he waited
several months
before leaving for Sweden. Descartes arrived in Sweden in the
fall of 1649. He managed
not to live at the court, but Christina scheduled
their class for 5 a.m., each day. Descartes
died the next the next February
of an inflammation of the lungs.
Rene' Descartes made some of his most
notable contributions in the field of
mathematics. He was the first
mathematician to classify curves to the types of equations
that produce them.
He also invented the method of indices to express the powers of a
number. His
chief contributions to mathematics were his analytical geometry and
his
theory of vortices, and it is on his researches in connection with the
former of these
subjects that his mathematical reputation rests. Analytical
geometry does not consist
merely in the application of algebra to geometry;
that had been done by many
mathematicians. The great advance made by
Descartes was that he saw that a point in a
plane could be completely
determined if it's distances, say x and y, from two fixed lines
drawn at
right angles in the plane were given, with the convention familiar to us as to
the
interpretation of positive and negative values: and though an equation
was indeterminate
and could be satisfied by an infinite number of values of x
and y, yet these values of x
and y determined the coordinates of a number of
points which form a curve, of which the
equation expresses some geometrical,
that is, a property true of a curve at every point on
it. Descartes asserted
that a point in space could be similarly determined by three
coordinates. In
addition, he formulated the rule, which is know as Descartes' rule of
signs,
for finding the number of positive and negative roots for any algebraic
equation.
Rene' Descartes, philosopher and mathematician, made many
contributions to our
world today. From developing his theory of vortices, and
inventing the method of indices.
His understandings have advanced our
world to modern understandings.