René Descartes was the father of modern philosophy and one of the greatest thinkers of the western world. Born in a small town near Tours, he was educated at the Jesuit College at La Flèche from 1604 to 1614, and later studied law at Poitiers. From 1618 he toured Europe extensively, partly in the course of military service. It was during this period that he had time to think and develop his ideas. In 1628 he settled in Holland, where he remained for 21 years. It was here that he published much of his work. He first challenged all of his beliefs which resulted in the certainty of his own experiences and existence, proposing cogito ergo sum ('I think therefore I am'). He then proceeded to suggest that God was the absolute perfect being and developed a theory that the world was composed of mind and matter, an approach which led to the development of the 'theory of knowledge' in modern philosophy.
Descartes' greatest work in mathematics was in the field of geometry. By using 'Cartesian coordinates' (though not in their modern form), he demonstrated that it was possible to describe points and curves using formulas and equations, an insight that was crucial to the development of coordinate geometry. In 1649 he moved to Stockholm where he became the private tutor to Queen Christina. Unfortunately, she liked to be taught daily at 5 am. This, coupled with a cold Scandinavian winter, led to Descartes contracting pneumonia from which he eventually died. Descartes was a devout Catholic and was careful to ensure that his scientific beliefs did not contradict the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church. He was fully aware of the sentence passed on Galileo for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system and he tailored his own model so as not to offend the church. Descartes was such an influential person that this erroneous model was to hold back astronomical progress for many years.
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