Biography of rene descartes math
René Descartes
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La Haye (now Descartes),Touraine, France
Stockholm, Sweden
Biography
René Descartes was a philosopher whose work, La GéométrieⓉ, includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian geometry.René Descartes' parents were Joachim Descartes (1563-1640) and Jeanne Brochard (1566-1597). Joachim, the son of the medical doctor Pierre Descartes (1515-1566), studied law and was a counsellor in the Parliament of Brittany which sat at Rennes. Jeanne was the daughter of the military man René Brochard who formed part of the garrison stationed at Poitiers. One of Jeanne's brothers, also named René Brochard, became one of René Descartes' two godfathers; René Descartes was named after his godfather René Brochard. Jeanne's widowed mother, Jeanne Sain Brochard, lived at La Haye, near Tours, and it was in her home that René was born. Joachim and Jeanne Descartes were married on 15 January 1589 and lived at Châtellerault. They had two surviving children older than René, a girl named Jeanne (born 1590) and a boy named Pierre (born 1591). René was baptised in the Roman Catholic Church of Saint George in La Haye when he was four days old. His mother died in childbirth a year after he was born and the boy, born at the time of her death, also died. At this time, René was sent back to his grandmother's home in La Haye where he was cared for by Jeanne Sain Brochard. Joachim Descartes remarried in 1600 to Anne Morin and they had a boy named Joachim (born 1602) and a girl named Anne (born 1611). René therefore had a older brother and an older sister, as well as a younger half-brother and younger half-sister. He did not return to liv
Descartes’ Mathematics
1. The Background to Descartes’ Mathematical Researches
When Descartes’ mathematical researches commenced in the early seventeenth century, mathematicians were wrestling with questions concerning the appropriate methods for geometrical proof and, in particular, the criteria for identifying curves that met the exact and rigorous standards of geometry and that could thus be used in geometrical problem-solving. These issues were given an added sense of urgency for practicing mathematicians when, in 1588, Commandino’s Latin translation of Pappus’s Collection (early fourth century CE) was published. In the Collection Pappus appeals to the ancient practice of geometry as he offers normative claims about how geometrical problems ought to be solved. Early modern readers gave special attention to Pappus’s proposals concerning (1) how a mathematician should construct the curves used in geometrical proof, and (2) how a geometer should apply the methods of analysis and synthesis in geometrical problem-solving. The construction of curves will be treated in 1.1 and analysis and synthesis in section 1.2 below.
1.1 The Construction of Curves and the Solution to Geometrical Problems
Pappus’s claims regarding the proper methods for constructing geometrical curves are couched in terms of the ancient classification of geometrical problems, which he famously describes in Book III of the Collection:
The ancients stated that there are three kinds of geometrical problems, and that some are called plane, others solid, and others line-like; and those that can be solved by straight lines and the circumference of a circle are rightly called plane because the lines by means of which these problems are solved have their origin in the plane. But such problems that must be solved by assuming one or more conic sections in the construction, are called solid because for their construction it is necessary to use the sur
René descartes' philosophy René Descartes
(1596-1650)
Who Was René Descartes?
René Descartes was extensively educated, first at a Jesuit college at age 8, then earning a law degree at 22, but an influential teacher set him on a course to apply mathematics and logic to understanding the natural world. This approach incorporated the contemplation of the nature of existence and of knowledge itself, hence his most famous observation, “I think; therefore I am.”
Early Life
Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, a small town in central France, which has since been renamed after him to honor its most famous son. He was the youngest of three children, and his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died within his first year of life. His father, Joachim, a council member in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, where they remained even after he remarried a few years later. But he was very concerned with good education and sent René, at age 8, to boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, several miles to the north, for seven years.
Descartes was a good student, although it is thought that he might have been sickly, since he didn’t have to abide by the school’s rigorous schedule and was instead allowed to rest in bed until midmorning. The subjects he studied, such as rhetoric and logic and the “mathematical arts,” which included music and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics, equipped him well for his future as a philosopher. So did spending the next four years earning a baccalaureate in law at the University of Poitiers. Some scholars speculate that he may have had a nervous breakdown during this time.
Descartes later added theology and medicine to his studies. But he eschewed all this, “resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world,” he wrote much later in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the R
René Descartes
French philosopher (1596–1650)
"Descartes" redirects here. For other uses, see Descartes (disambiguation).
René Descartes (day-KART, DAY-kart; French:[ʁənedekaʁt]; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was paramount to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, and later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
Many elements of Descartes's philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differed from the schools on two major points. First, he rejected the splitting of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejected any appeal to final ends, divine or natural, in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God's act of creation. Refusing to accept the authority of previous philosophers, Descartes frequently set his views apart from the philosophers who preceded him. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before." His best known philosophical statement is "cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am"; French: Je pense, donc je suis), found in Discourse on the Method (1637, in French and Latin, 1644) an
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