ProofWiki:Mathematicians/René Descartes
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Also known as Renatus Cartesius.
French mathematician and philosopher who is supposed to have invented the Cartesian coordinate system, and thence the field of analytic geometry.
In fact, as reported in George F. Simmons: Calculus Gems (1992), he did nothing of the kind.
Contents |
Nationality
French
History
- Born: 31 March 1596, La Haye (now Descartes), Touraine, France.
- Died: 11 Feb 1650, Stockholm, Sweden
Theorems
- Independently discovered Snell's Law in 1637, hence it is known in France as Descartes' Law or the the Snell-Descartes Law.
Books and Papers
- 1618: Renati Descartes Musicae Compendium (unpublished until after his death in 1650)
- 1637: Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences, including:
- La Dioptrique (on optics)
- Les Météores (on meteorology, one of the first attempts to put weather on a scientific basis)
- La Géométrie (his most important work, in which he is supposed to have joined algebra to geometry)
- 1641: Meditations on First Philosophy
- 1644: Principia Philosophiae, in four parts:
- The Principles of Human Knowledge
- The Principles of Material Things
- Of the Visible World
- The Earth
- 1644: Meditations
- Le Monde, ou Traité de la Lumière published (in part) after his death
References
- ↑ George F. Simmons: Calculus Gems (1992): "Any qualified person who examines Descartes's treatise on geometry will soon convince himself that this work contains nothing about perpendicular axes, or the "Cartesian" coordinates of a point ... His Geometry was little read then and is less read now, and deservedly so, ... he wrote it more to boast than to explain, and somehow he managed to cow most of his contemporaries and successors into believing against the evidence that he had accomplished something worthwhile."
Also see
- Eric Temple Bell: Men of Mathematics (1937): Chapter $\text{III}$
- George F. Simmons: Calculus Gems (1992): Chapter $\text {A}.11$
