René Déscartes
René Déscartes was a famous mathematician, writer and philosopher, who belonged to 16th century.
René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist whose writings sit at the foundation of modern Western thought. Born on 31 March 1596 in La Haye en Touraine, the village now renamed Descartes in his honour, he died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm at the age of 53.
Educated by the Jesuits at the Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche and trained in law at the University of Poitiers, he travelled in the armies of Maurice of Nassau and Maximilian of Bavaria before settling in the Dutch Republic in 1628. There he produced his major works in relative seclusion over more than two decades.
His Discours de la méthode (1637) introduced the formula cogito, ergo sum—"I think, therefore I am"—as the indubitable starting point of philosophy, and the appended treatise La Géométrie founded analytic geometry by uniting algebra with curves through coordinate axes that still bear the adjective Cartesian. The Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) systematised his arguments for the existence of God and the distinction between mind and body.
He also wrote on optics, meteorology, and physiology, formulating an early version of the law of refraction and a mechanistic account of the human body. Invited to Stockholm in 1649 by Queen Christina of Sweden to give early-morning philosophy lessons, he contracted pneumonia in the harsh winter and died within months.
The name René is the French form of Renatus, from the Latin meaning "reborn", a name favoured among early Christians as a reference to baptismal rebirth. He carried it through a body of work that genuinely renewed European philosophy.