Rene Descartes was a math philosopher, he was born in Toures, on March 31 1596, and he died at Stockholm on February 11 1650. His father was forced to spend half the year at Rennes, where he was a councilman. The rest of the time he spent with his family of Les Cartes at La Haye. Rene was the second child out of four kids. At the age of eight, he was sent to the Jesuit School at La Fleche. The school had very good education and discipline. On account of his delicate health, he was permitted to lie in bed until late in the mornings. In 1647, he visited Pascal, he told himself that the only way to do good work in math, and to keep his health was to never allow anyone to make him get up in the morning before he felt he had to. In 1612, Descartes went to Paris to be introduced to the world of fashion. There he met up with his old friend from school-Mersenne, and together they devoted the two years of 1615 and 1616 to the study of math. Then in 1617 he joined the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, and then at Breda, which is a school. One time when Rene was walking through the streets and he saw a sign in Dutch, which “excited his curiosity”. He stopped the first passer and asked him to translate it into either French or Latin. The man he had stopped happened to be Isaac Beckman, the head of the Dutch college at Dort. Isaac said he would translate it if Rene would answer it. The sign was in fact a challenge to the entire world to solve a geometrical problem. Rene got the answer within a few hours, then him and Isaac’s friendship was the result. In 1621, he quit the army and spent the next five years in travel, most of the time he studied math. Rene saw that a point in a plane could be completely determined if its distances, say “x” and “y”, from two fixed lines drawn at right angles in the plane. With positive and negative values and that though an equation “f(x,y)=0” was unexplained an...
