Person1596 – 1650
René Descartes
Also called: Descartes, Cartesius
French philosopher and mathematician who, starting from “I think, therefore I am”, built the deductive method of rationalism
Born into a family of magistrates in Touraine, France, he was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche. Dissatisfied with school learning, he resolved to read “the great book of the world”, joining an army early in the Thirty Years’ War and travelling through Europe. From the late 1620s he lived for over twenty years in the Netherlands, where thought was freer, and wrote there. He created analytic geometry, expressing figures as equations by means of coordinates. Invited to Stockholm by Queen Christina of Sweden in 1649, he died of pneumonia the following year.