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Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

Personal Background

On leaving school in 1612 Descartes went to Paris to be introduced to the world of fashion. Here, through the medium of the Jesuits, he made the acquaintance of Mydorge, and renewed his schoolboy friendship with Mersenne, and together with them he devoted the two years of 1615 and 1616 to the study of mathematics. At that time a man of position usually entered either the army or the church; Descartes chose the former profession, and in 1617 joined the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, then at Breda. Walking through the streets there he saw a placard in Dutch which excited his curiosity, and stopping the first passer, asked him to translate it into either French or Latin. The stranger, who happened to be Isaac Beeckman, the head of the Dutch College at Dort, offered to do so if Descartes would answer it; the placard being, in fact, a challenge to all the world to solve a certain geometrical problem. Descartes worked it out within a few hours, and a warm friendship between him and Beeckman was the result. This unexpected test of his mathematical attainments made the uncongenial life of the army distasteful to him, but under family influence and tradition he remained a soldier, and was persuaded at the commencement of the Thirty Years' War to volunteer under Count de Bucquoy in the army of Bavaria. He continued all this time to occupy his leisure with mathematical studies, and was accustomed to date the first ideas of his new philosophy and of his analytical geometry from three dreams which he experienced on the night of November 10, 1619, at Neuberg, when campaigning on the Danube. He regarded this as the critical day of his life, and one which determined his whole future.

He resigned his commission in the spring of 1621, and spent the next five years in travel, during most of which time he continued to study pure mathematics. In 1626 we find him settled at Paris, ``a little well-built figure, modestly clad in green taffety, and only wearing sword and feather in token of his quality as a gentleman.'' During the first two years there he interested himself in general society, and spent his leisure in the construction of optical instruments; but these pursuits were merely the relaxations of one who failed to find in philosophy that theory of the universe which he was convinced finally awaited him.

In 1628 Cardinal de Berulle, the founder of the Oratorians, met Descartes, and was so much impressed by his conversation that he urged on him the duty of devoting his life to the examination of truth. Descartes agreed, and the better to secure himself from interruption moved to Holland, then at the height of his power. There for twenty years he lived, giving up all his time to philosophy and mathematics. Science, he says, may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine, and morals, these forming the three applications of our knowledge, namely, to the external world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life.

He spend the first four years, 1629 to 1633, of his stay in Holland in writing Le Monde, which embodies an attempt to give a physical theory of the universe; but finding that its publication was likely to bring on him the hostility of the church, and having no desire to pose as a martyr, he abandoned it: the incomplete manuscript was published in 1664. He then devoted himself to composing a treatise on universal science; this was published at Leyden in 1637 under the title Discours de la mÚthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vÚritÚ dans les sciences, and was accompanied with three appendices (which possibly were not issued till 1638) entitled La Dioptrique, Les MÚtÚores, and La GÚomÚtrie; it is from the last of these that the invention of analytical geometry dates. In 1641 he published a work called Meditationes, in which he explained at some length his views on philosophy as sketched out in the Discours. In 1644 he issued the Principia Philosophiae, the greater part of which was devoted to physical science, especially the laws of motion and the theory of vortices. In 1647 he received a pension from the French court in honour of his discoveries. He went to Sweden on the invitation of the Queen in 1649, and died a few months later of inflammation of the lungs.

Resume

My chief contributions to mathematics were in analytical geometry and my theory of vortices, and it is on this researches in connection with the former of these subjects that my mathematical reputation rests.

Hobbies and Interests

Live Action Role Playing, Motorcycling, Networked Computer Games, MechWarrior Mercs, Drama, Books

From `A Short Account of the History of Mathematics' (4the edition, 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball.

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