René Descartes

René Descartes was a French gentleman, soldier and mathematician who settled in the Dutch Republic to think in peace and died in Stockholm, tutoring Queen Christina in the cold before dawn. The Discourse on Method and the Meditations began modern philosophy by doubting everything that could be doubted and rebuilding from the one certainty that remained, the thinking self. The Geometry joined algebra to geometry and gave us the coordinate plane. The lists read the Meditations with the objections his contemporaries raised and his replies, since the argument was public from the start.