User:RolandWill
My name is Roland Will and I am a second year student in the Faculty of Arts.
Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes was one of the greatest thinkers of the 17th century, and his discoveries are still essential for contemporary students of philosophy and mathematics to understand. A polymath, Descartes was a scholar in many subjects from the natural sciences to theology. While his prolific work and decades of dedication proved that he was enthusiastic and serious in his studies regardless of the topic, Descartes felt that, above all else, he was a mathematician. A look at his mathematical legacy indicates why he why he may have felt this way. Descartes’ creation of the “Cartesian coordinate system” (which is the now common grid system with multiple planes) allowed Descartes to synthesize Euclidean geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. This discovery gave Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz the foundation on which they developed calculus later in the 17th century.
However, Descartes’ ideas were not the only thing to be valuable about his work. In the 1840’s the Italian count and mathematician Guglielmo Libri stole many of Descartes’ manuscripts along with thousands of other documents while Libri was the secretary of the Committee for the General Catalog of Manuscripts in French Public Libraries. In 1861, thirteen years after seeking political asylum in Britain after stealing 30,000 French documents, Libri replenished his wealth with the profits from two auctions containing 7,628 lots. Since its genesis, Descartes’ work has been both intellectually and financially precious.
References:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_coordinate_system