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René Descartes Born: March 31, 1596 in France Died: February 11, 1650 in Sweden This one thing [analytic geometry] is of the highest order of excellence, marked by the sensuous simplicity of the half dozen or so greatest contributions of all time to mathematics. Descartes remade geometry and made modern geometry possible. (E. T. Bell) Rene Descartes was the third child of a well off noble family. His mother died a few days after his birth, and he was …

…stopped that easily. Descartes' marriage of geometry and algebra was elegantly simple and extremely powerful. It reinvigorated both algebra and geometry and was a necessary ingredient for the development of calculus 30 years later. Descartes developed techniques for some of the problems of calculus, but they were overshadowed by the simpler and more powerful techniques of Newton and Leibniz. In 1667, Descartes' bones were taken back to France and entombed in the Pantheon in Paris. Bibliography None