Rene Decartes

The French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, or Renatus des Cartes as he called himself in his Latin publications, lived during the early 17th century. He studied law, but since he had rich parents he never had to earn any money with his learned profession.

In Descartes' time, there was a new interest in geometry. Already the Greeks had studied perfect shapes like the line, the circle or conic sections and the curves which derive of it. Now it got important to know more about curves, for example to study the path of projectiles when shot from cannons, or to design lenses used in telescopes and microscopes.