René Descartes
French Philosopher,
Physicist and Mathematician Rene Descartes is best known for his ‘Cogito Ergo
Sum’ philosophy. Despite this, the Frenchman, who lived 1596 to 1650, made
ground breaking contributions to mathematics. Alongside Newton and Leibniz,
Descartes helped provide the foundations of modern calculus (which Newton and
Leibniz later built upon), which in itself had great bearing on the modern day
field. Alongside this, and perhaps more familiar to the reader, is his
development of Cartesian Geometry, known to most as the standard graph (Square
grid lines, x and y axis, etc.) and its use of algebra to describe the various
locations on such. Before this most geometers used plain paper (or another
material or surface) to preform their art. Previously, such distances had to be
measured literally, or scaled. With the introduction of Cartesian Geometry this
changed dramatically, points could now be expressed as points on a graph, and
as such, graphs could be drawn to any scale, also these points did not
necessarily have to be numbers. The final contribution to the field was his
introduction of superscripts within algebra to express powers. And thus, like
many others in this list, contributed to the development of modern mathematical
notation.
