Biography of rene descartes mathematicians

Birth

Rene Descartes, French mathematician and philosopher was born in 1596. It was partly because of his contribution that western philosophy and mathematics flourished. In recognition of his contribution, he is often referred as “father or founder father of modern philosophy”. He is also considered as precursor of rationalist school of thought.

His Contribution to Mathematics

In mathematics, his contribution lies chiefly in geometry that’s why today he is known as father of analytical geometry. His main achievement was to bridge the gulf between algebra and geometry. Thus he is widely acclaimed as first mathematician who laid the foundation of modern geometry that resulted in development of analysis and calculus. With regard to algebra, he explained in detail that how algebric equations can be expressed and explained through use of geometrical shapes.

He also sought to find out the systematic meaning of knowledge by application of mathematical techniques. In this way, he broke from conventional scholastic-Aristotelian philosophy that used to explain haphazardly the interrelationship between ideas. Thus, instead of following the tradition, he replaced this casual explanation of nature of things with more scientific method. He intended to reach at mechanistic rationalization of beliefs by providing a more concrete basis. This mechanistic principle is not only applied to human or animal bodies but also plants. Thus, he embarked upon a quest to engage in a scientific enquiry as contrary to his predecessors. He also changed the scholastic explanation of substantial forms in physics by his mechanistic philosophy.

Descartes also tended to apply geometric method to physics and also explained it by deductive method that results can be inferred by perceptions of geometric properties of body. As Descartes explained this

“from what has already been said we have established that all the bodies in the universe are composed of one and the same matter, which is divisi

  • René descartes education

    • René Descartes

    Quick Info

    Born
    31 March 1596
    La Haye (now Descartes),Touraine, France
    Died
    11 February 1650
    Stockholm, Sweden
    Summary
    René Descartes was a French philosopher whose work, La géométrie, includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian geometry. His work had a great influence on both mathematicians and philosophers.

    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
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      • Biography of rene descartes mathematicians

    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