René Descartes

René Descartes (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician and scientist, often called the father of modern philosophy. Born in Touraine and educated by the Jesuits at La Flèche, he served as a volunteer in the Dutch and Bavarian armies and then settled in the Netherlands, where he lived for twenty years. The Discourse on the Method of 1637 and the Meditations of 1641 set out his attempt to rebuild knowledge from the one certainty of his own thinking, and his Geometry founded analytic geometry and gave us the Cartesian coordinates. Invited to Stockholm to teach Queen Christina, he died of pneumonia in his first Swedish winter.