René Descartes (1596-1650)

René Descartes was born in La Haye, Touraine (France) on March 31, 1596, and died at the age of 54 in Stockholm (Sweden) on February 11, 1650. He was born to a family of three with a sister and brother. It is clear that René grew up in wealthy surroundings because his father was a counselor of the Parliament of Britainy - noblesse de la robe. Descartes’ grandfather and great grandfather were physicians - on his mother's side. Many considered Descartes the first one to come up with modern school mathematics.

At the age of eight in 1604 he was sent to the Jesuits school at La Flêche. In 1612 he left school and went to Paris to be introduced to the world of fashion. Here, through the Jesuits, he became friends with Mydorge, and renewed his schoolboy friendship with Mersenne, and together with them he studied mathematics for the next two years of 1615 and 1616. At that time a man from upper class families usually entered the army or the church; Descartes chose to join the army. He served in two armies first in the Dutch and later the Bavarian. While in the Dutch army he was stationed at Breda. One day he was walking through the streets there and found a poster written in Dutch which raised his curiosity. He stopped the first person that came along and asked him if he could translate it into French or Latin. The person he stopped happened to be Isaac Beeckman the head of the Dutch collage at Dort. Beeckman said he would translate it if Descartes would try to answer it, the poster was a challenge to all the world to solve a certain geometrical problem. Descartes worked it out in a few hours, and this resulted in a close friendship between him and Beeckman. This unexpected test of his mathematical skills gave him a strong feeling to study mathematics full-time and he wanted to quit the army, but tradition and family influence made him finish his military term. At this point all his leisure time was devoted to mathematical studies.

On the night of November 10, 1619, at Neuberg, when he was patrolling the Danube River, Descartes had three dreams, which gave him the first ideas of his new philosophy and of his analytical geometry. He considered this to be a very important point in his life because he heard of other masterminds having great ideas come to them in their dreams.

Descartes resigned from the army in April of 1621 and decided to do some traveling, still spending most of his time studying pure mathematics. After five years of travel at the age of thirty he decided to settle in Paris and take a break from studying mathematics and do some general studies. Here, he discovered an interest in optical instruments, he designed a machine that would grind non-spherical lenses. He spent a lot of time trying to find the best shape of lense to use in a telescope. He spent two years studying optics and general society, but this was only taking a break from one of his major goals, which was to find in philosophy that theory of the universe.

In 1628 Descartes decided he was going to do some serious studying in philosophy and mathematics. To do this he needed some peace and quite so he left Paris and went to Holland. He lived there for twenty years moving every now and then to isolate himself from the general public. By this time he had inherited one third of his mother’s property worth about 27,000 livres and also inherited much of his father’s property worth over 50,000 livres. In today’s value he would be a millionaire. So we can see he lived quite comfortably and did not need to work, this gave him all of his time to study and write. The first four years in Holland he spent his time writing La Monde, which was an attempt to give a physical theory of the universe. This was published at Leyden in 1637 under the title Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité dans les sciences. (English: discussion of the method to good conduct of his reason and to find the truth in science) and was accompanied with three appendices. La Dioptrique, Les Météores, and La Géométrie. In 1647 the French court gave him a pension in honor of his discoveries.

Descartes was a devout catholic and after becoming so famous in his lifetime many Catholics believed he would be a candidate for sainthood. In 1649 at the request of Queen Christian of Sweden he moved to Stockholm to be a philosophy tutor, only to die a few months later in 1650 of inflammation of the lungs. In appearance Descartes was a small man with a large head, his forehead stuck out, he had a long pointed nose, and he had long black hair coming down to his eyebrows. His voice sounded feeble. His manor was cold and selfish. He never married but he had one daughter who died young so he had no descendants.