Rene Descartes

Rene Descartes


     Rene Descartes was born March 31, 1596 in La Haye, Touraine.  Descartes was the

son of a minor nobleman and belonged to a family that had produced a number of

learned men.  At the age of eight, he was enrolled in the Jesuit school of La

Fleche in Anjou, where he remained for eight years.  Besides the usual classical

studies, he received instruction in math and in Scholastic philosophy.  Roman

Catholicism exerted a strong influence on Descartes throughout his life.  Upon

graduation from school, he studied law at the University of Poitiers, graduating

in 1616.  He never practiced law, however--in 1618 he entered the service of

Prince Maurice of Nassau at Breda, Netherlands, with the intention of following

a military career.  In succeeding years Descartes served in other armies, but

his attention had already been attracted to the problems of mathematics and

philosophy to which he was to devote the rest of his life.  He made a pilgrimage

to Italy in 1623-24, and spent the years from 1624 to 1628 in France.  While in

France, he devoted himself to the study of philosophy and also experimented in

optics.  In 1628, having sold his properties in France, he moved to the

Netherlands, where he spent most of the rest of his life.  He lived for varying

periods in a number of different cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam,

Deventer, Utrecht, and Leiden.

     It was probably during the first years of his residence in the

Netherlands that Descartes wrote his first major work, Essais philosophiques,

published in 1637.  The work contained four parts:  an essay on geometry,

another on optics, a third on meteors, and Discours de la methode (Discourse on

Method), which described his philosophical theories.  This was followed by other

philosophical works, among them Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations

on First Philosophy, 1641) and  Principia Philosophiae (The Principles of

Philosophy, 1644).  The latter volume was dedicated to Princess Elizabeth Stuart

of Bohemia, who lived in the Netherlands and with whom Descartes had formed a

deep friendship.  In 1649, Descartes was invited to the court of Queen Christina

of Sweden in Stockholm to give the queen instruction in philosophy.  The rigors

of the northern winter brought on the pneumonia that caused his death on

February 1, 1650.

     The most notable contribution that Descartes made to mathematics was the

systematization of analytic geometry.  He was the first mathematician to attempt

to classify curves according to the types of equations that produce them.  He

also made contributions to the theory of equations and succeeded in proving the

impossibility of trisecting the angle and doubling the cube.  Descartes was the

first to use the
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