Rene+Descarte

Pictures [|Rene Descarte] Rene Descartes (1595-1650) "I think, therefore I am" Pictures Pictures [|Rene Descarte] [|Rene Descarte] Rene Descartes

(1595-1650)   By: Tyler Heinz

AFM (Advanced Functions and Modeling) Mrs. Brittany Taylor 3rd Block

Rene Descartes, born on March 31 in 1595 at La Haye( now called Descartes) France, is to be considered one of the most influential thinkers in human history. Descartes’ parents were Joachim Descartes and Jeanne Brochard. His mother died one year after his birth and his father was a lawyer and a magistrate, so raising a family was hard for his father. So Descartes and his brother and sister, Pierre and Jeanne, were raised by their grandmother. (lucidcafe) From 1606 to 1614, Descartes attended a school called la fleche, a Jesuit college in Anjou. He then went to Paris for the next two years to study mathematics and was being introduced into a fashionable French society. He the studied at the university of Poitiers, at the beginning of 1616, but did not finish because he went off to the Netherlands to volunteer with the Dutch army. Descartes did not marry and did not pass on his name in any children, he studied mathematics and philosophy, but that is it. Descartes, in his later years was convinced by Queen Christina of Sweden to come to Stockholm. One month after getting there, he dies of pneumonia on February 11, 1650. Rene Descartes is famous for being not only a mathematician, but being a great philosopher. In 1641; Descartes published one of his greatest pieces, “A Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy”, the year before Galileo died and Isaac Newton was born. He sought to devise a method of systematic doubt had an enormous impact on the subsequent development of philosophy. (ludicafe) He also introduced a now famous Latin phrase, “Cogito ergo sum” or in English, “I think, therefore I am” (ludicafe) In Descartes' view, the universe was created by God on whose power everything depends. He thought of God as resembling the human mind in that both the mind and God think, but have no physical being. But he believed that God is unlike the human mind in that God is infinite and does not depend on a creator for His existence. (ludicafe) Other than being a grat philosopher, he was also a great mathematician, inventing analytic geometry and attempting to devise a simple universal law that governed all physical change. (ludicafe) René Descartes made many notable contributions to mathematics. In 1618 Descartes journeyed to Holland, where he met Isaac Beeckman, a thirty year-old student of medicine who was astounded at the range of Descartes' scientific curiosity. Descartes showed Beeckman how to apply algebra and mathematics to many problems. He proposed algebraic formula to determine the raise in water level when a heavy object was placed in water, drew a geometric graph that showed how to predict the accelerating speed of a pencil falling in a vacuum at any time during a two hour period, and showed how a spinning top stays upright and how this could be used to help man become airborne. Beeckman's journal showed us that by the end of 1618, Descartes was already applying algebraic equations to solve geometric problems, and that it was then, not later as many sources say, that he invented analytical geometry. (ludicafe)