Mathematician rene descartes biography and contribution

He is considered one of the founders of analytical philosophy and has inspired countless other thinkers throughout history. Rene Descartes French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, physiologist Date of Birth: Contact About Privacy. Daniil Bernulli. He was educated at a boarding Jesuit school when he was eight years old. There, he studied mathematics, music, astronomy, metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics.

Later, he earned a law degree when he was 22 from the University of Poitiers. Shortly after his graduation, Descartes had three very powerful visions or dreams that he attributed for establishing the path of his life-long studies. Next, he traveled and spent time in the army. During his travels, he met Isaac Beeckman, a Dutch philosopher and scientist.

Beeckman soon became a close mentor. Descartes went back to France in , and he spent a couple of years in Paris as well as other areas of Europe. Some of his most fundamental works considered central to Western philosophy continue to be standard texts at universities and schools of philosophy today.

Mathematician rene descartes biography and contribution

These include:. Descartes' philosophical works marked the transition from one era the medieval world to philosophical modernity. Most of his works revolve around the criticism of established methods of thought, the construction of a new method to attain truth, the development of hyperbolic doubt the "methodic doubt" and the ego cogito as the first evident truth.

Other philosophical ideas and concepts introduced by Descartes include the mind-body dualism, the immortality of the soul, the immanence of ideas, the levels of reality, the physical functioning of the body which is very close to contemporary understanding and the origin of the content of dreams, among others. His contributions to the field were numerous and are related to his method of formulating concepts.

For instance, he introduced the use of the letters of the alphabet as variables , making the distinction between the first letters A, B, C Furthermore, Descartes introduced the mathematical notation used to indicate powers or exponents and the Cartesian Rule of Signs. Today, we speak of "Cartesian plane" in his honor. While his contributions to physics were not as significant, optics and mechanics greatly benefited from his thinking.

Algebra makes it possible to recognise the typical problems in geometry and to bring together problems which in geometrical dress would not appear to be related at all. Algebra imports into geometry the most natural principles of division and the most natural hierarchy of method. Not only can questions of solvability and geometrical possibility be decided elegantly, quickly and fully from the parallel algebra, without it they cannot be decided at all.

Wallis writes There seems little to justify Wallis 's claim, which was probably made partly through patriotism but also through his just desires to give Harriot more credit for his work. Harriot 's work on equations, however, may indeed have influenced Descartes who always claimed, clearly falsely, that nothing in his work was influenced by the work of others.

Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy , was published in , designed for the philosopher and for the theologian. However many scientists were opposed to Descartes' ideas including Arnauld , Hobbes and Gassendi. This is an important point of view and was to point the way forward. Descartes did not believe in action at a distance. Therefore, given this, there could be no vacuum around the Earth otherwise there was no way that forces could be transferred.

In many ways Descartes' theory, where forces work through contact, is more satisfactory than the mysterious effect of gravity acting at a distance. However Descartes' mechanics leaves much to be desired. He assumes that the universe is filled with matter which, due to some initial motion, has settled down into a system of vortices which carry the sun, the stars, the planets and comets in their paths.

Despite the problems with the vortex theory it was championed in France for nearly one hundred years even after Newton showed it was impossible as a dynamical system. As Brewster, one of Newton 's 19 th century biographers, puts it:- Thus entrenched as the Cartesian system was The uninstructed mind could not readily admit the idea that the great masses of the planets were suspended in empty space, and retained their orbits by an invisible influence Pleasing as Descartes' theory was, even the supporters of his natural philosophy such as the Cambridge metaphysical theologian Henry More, found objections.

Certainly More admired Descartes, writing:- I should look upon Des-Cartes as a man most truly inspired in the knowledge of Nature, than any that have professed themselves so these sixteen hundred years However between and they exchanged a number of letters in which More made some telling objections. Descartes however in his replies makes no concessions to More's points.

More went on to ask:- Why are not your vortices in the form of columns or cylinders rather than ellipses, since any point of the axis of a vortex is as it were a centre from which the celestial matter recedes with, as far as I can see, a wholly constant impetus? Who causes all the planets not to revolve in one plane the plane of the ecliptic?

And the Moon itself, neither in the plane of the Earth's equator nor in a plane parallel to this? In , the year his Meditations were published, Descartes visited France. He returned again in , when he met Pascal and argued with him that a vacuum could not exist, and then again in However the Queen wanted to draw tangents at 5 a. After only a few months in the cold northern climate, walking to the palace for 5 o'clock every morning, he died of pneumonia.

Only the first 21 of the Rules were presented, the last three being only given by their intended titles. Sadly, the original manuscript has been lost and only copies remain. Here is a short extract from the manuscript:- I would not value these Rules so highly if they were good only for solving those pointless problems with which arithmeticians and geometers are inclined to while away their time, for in that case all I could credit myself with achieving would be to dabble in trifles with greater subtlety than they.

I shall have much to say below about figures and numbers, for no other disciplines can yield illustrations as evident and certain as these. But if one attends closely to my meaning, one will readily see that ordinary mathematics is far from my mind here, that it is quite another discipline I am expounding, and that these illustrations are more its outer garments than its inner parts.

This discipline should contain the primary rudiments of human reason and extend to the discovery of truths in any field whatever. Frankly speaking, I am convinced that it is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other with which human beings are endowed, as it is the source of all the rest. We should end this biography by saying a little more about Descartes as a person.

In [ ] Langer describes Descartes' appearance and personality:- In appearance Descartes was a small man of rather slight figure with a large head. His nose was prominent, his lower lip somewhat protruding, his beard and moustache of a semi-military type, and his hair growing down upon his forehead almost to his eyebrows. He wore a wig of natural colour to which he always gave fastidious attention, as he did also to his clothes which were now invariably of black cloth.

In demeanour he was generally cheerful, rarely gay. His manners were always refined, gentle, and polite, and his temper tranquil and easy. As a personality he was proud, somewhat aristocratically reserved, sensitive, a bit angular, and, though a shade domineering, was pre-eminently obliging. Bertrand Russell writes [ ] :- He always was well dressed, and wore a sword.

He was not industrious; he worked short hours, and read little. When he went to Holland he took few books with him, but among them were the Bible and Thomas Aquinas. His work seems to have been done with great concentration during short periods; but perhaps, to keep up the appearance of a gentlemanly amateur, he may have pretended to work less than in fact he did, for otherwise his achievements seem scarcely credible.

References show. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Y Belaval, Leibniz critique de Descartes Paris,