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Rene Descartes was born in the town of La Haye in southern France.
From an early age Descartes liked mathematics because of "the certainty
of its results and the clarity of its reasoning." He believed that in
order to arrive at truth, one must begin by doubting everything, including
one's own existence; this led him to formulate perhaps the most well-known
sentence in all of philosophy: "I think, therefore I am." In his book
Discourse on Method he described what is now called the Cartesian plane.
This idea of combining algebra and geometry enabled mathematicians for
the first time to "see" the equations they were studying. The philosopher
John Stuart Mill called this invention "the greatest single step ever
made in the progress of the exact sciences." Descartes liked to get
up late and spend the morning in bed thinking and writing. He invented
the coordinate plane while lying in bed watching a fly crawl on the
ceiling, reasoning that he could describe the exact location of the
fly by knowing its distance from two perpendicular walls. In 1649 Descartes
became the tutor of Queen Christina of Sweden. She liked her lessons
at 5 o'clock in the morning when, she said, her mind was sharpest. However,
the change from his usual habits and the ice-cold library where they
studied proved too much for him. In February 1650, after just two months
of this, he caught pneumonia and died.
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