Students' Contributions: Rene Descartes and Analytic Geometry (by 9B Minnie Yuan)

Rene Descartes was both a famous philosopher and a great mathematician. He was born on March 31, 1596 in the southern part of France. In 1606, he entered the Jesuit College. In 1637, after he left the army, he had a quiet life and that’s when he started to have all his crazy ideas. He published a detailed report on how to use coordinates to locate points in space. That is known as analytic geometry, which is also better known as Cartesian geometry. Analytic geometry is used to find slopes, distances, midpoints, and stuff like that which you learned them in school. Despite his discovery in geometry, he also had a great contribution to philosophy. He is the person who said the famous quote: ‘‘I think, therefore I am. ” He had   written 3 important texts called Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy.

I think Descartes is a really smart person. He is definitely a genius because he knows so many things in almost every area!  He is amazing to think about these weird formulas to calculate for distance and things like that. His contribution really made calculating math a lot easier. Without these formulas, we might still even be using a very complicated way to calculate math, or maybe, we won’t even be doing math! So in a way he is a great person, but in another way his discovery is kind of a mistake because he made us have to do math. Just kidding, I think he is a fabulous man. He is one of those people who contribute to the world, who makes people’s lives easier and better. He is a man that we should all respect and learn from.

Sources: 
http://www.answers.com/topic/ren-descartes
http://www.freeessays.cc/db/30/mdg2.shtml
http://www.renedescartes.com/Default.htm