Descartes From Elco Essay Research Paper Ren

Descartes From Elco Essay, Research Paper

Ren Descartes (1596 – 1650)

From `A Short Account of the History of Mathematics’ (4th edition, 1908) by W. W. Rouse Ball.

We may consider Descartes as the first of the modern school of mathematics. Ren Descartes was born near Tours on March 31, 1596, and died at Stockholm on February 11, 1650; thus he was a contemporary of Galileo and Desargues. His father, who, as the name implies, was of good family, was accustomed to spend half the year at Rennes when the local parliament, in which he held a commission as councillor, was in session, and the rest of the time on his family estate of Les Cartes at La Haye. Ren , the second of a family of two sons and one daughter, was sent at the age of eight years to the Jesuit School at La Fl che, and of the admirable discipline and education there given he speaks most highly. On account of his delicate health he was permitted to lie in bed till late in the mornings; this was a custom which he always followed, and when he visited Pascal in 1647 he told him that the only way to do good work in mathematics and to preserve his health was never to allow anyone to make him get up in the morning before he felt inclined to do so; an opinion which I chronicle for the benefit of any schoolboy into whose hands this work may fall.

On leaving school in 1612 Descartes went to Paris to be introduced to the world of fashion. Here, through the medium of the Jesuits, he made the acquaintance of Mydorge, and renewed his schoolboy friendship with Mersenne, and together with them he devoted the two years of 1615 and 1616 to the study of mathematics. At that time a man of position usually entered either the army or the church; Descartes chose the former profession, and in 1617 joined the army of Prince Maurice of Orange, then at Breda. Walking through the streets there he saw a placard in Dutch which excited his curiosity, and stopping the first passer, asked him to translate it into either French or Latin. The stranger, who happened to be Isaac Beeckman, the head of the Dutch College at Dort, offered to do so if Descartes would answer it; the placard being, in fact, a challenge to all the world to solve a certain geometrical problem. Descartes worked it out within a few hours, and a warm friendship between him and Beeckman was the result. This unexpected test of his mathematical attainments made the uncongenial life of the army distasteful to him, but under family influence and tradition he remained a soldier, and was persuaded at the commencement of the Thirty Years’ War to volunteer under Count de Bucquoy in the army of Bavaria. He continued all this time to occupy his leisure with mathematical studies, and was accustomed to date the first ideas of his new philosophy and of his analytical geometry from three dreams which he experienced on the night of November 10, 1619, at Neuberg, when campaigning on the Danube. He regarded this as the critical day of his life, and one which determined his whole future.

He resigned his commission in the spring of 1621, and spent the next five years in travel, during most of which time he continued to study pure mathematics. In 1626 we find him settled at Paris, “a little well-built figure, modestly clad in green taffety, and only wearing sword and feather in token of his quality as a gentleman.” During the first two years there he interested himself in general society, and spent his leisure in the construction of optical instruments; but these pursuits were merely the relaxations of one who failed to find in philosophy that theory of the universe which he was convinced finally awaited him.

In 1628 Cardinal de Berulle, the founder of the Oratorians, met Descartes, and was so much impressed by his conversation that he urged on him the duty of devoting his life to the examination of truth. Descartes agreed, and the better to secure himself from interruption moved to Holland, then at the height of his power. There for twenty years he lived, giving up all his time to philosophy and mathematics. Science, he says, may be compared to a tree; metaphysics is the root, physics is the trunk, and the three chief branches are mechanics, medicine, and morals, these forming the three applications of our knowledge, namely, to the external world, to the human body, and to the conduct of life.

He spend the first four years, 1629 to 1633, of his stay in Holland in writing Le Monde, which embodies an attempt to give a physical theory of the universe; but finding that its publication was likely to bring on him the hostility of the church, and having no desire to pose as a martyr, he abandoned it: the incomplete manuscript was published in 1664. He then devoted himself to composing a treatise on universal science; this was published at Leyden in 1637 under the title Discours de la m thode pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la v rit dans les sciences, and was accompanied with three appendices (which possibly were not issued till 1638) entitled La Dioptrique, Les M t ores, and La G om trie; it is from the last of these that the invention of analytical geometry dates. In 1641 he published a work called Meditationes, in which he explained at some length his views on philosophy as sketched out in the Discours. In 1644 he issued the Principia Philosophiae, the greater part of which was devoted to physical science, especially the laws of motion and the the