Rene Descartes was one of the most important and influential thinkers in human history. Both modern mathematics and modern philosophy began with the work of Rene Descartes. He is often referred to as the father of modern philosophy. His invention of coordinate geometry paved the way for advances in mathematics. Descartes also offered a modern theory for the origin of the solar system of the Earth.
             Rene Descartes was born on March 31 1596, at La Haye in the Touraine region of France. He was educated at the Jesuit college of La Fleche where he admired his teachers but later he said that he found little of the substance in the course of instruction and that only mathematics had given him any certain knowledge. After receiving a law degree in 1616 at the University of Poitiers, he became a volunteer in the Dutch and then the Bavarian army and traveled throughout Europe. He resumed his studies of math and science when his duties permitted. He was unsatisfied with the haphazard methods of science and then in use, he began to doubt all but mathematical knowledge. Descartes method of systematic doubt had a great impact on the resulting development of philosophy.
             In 1619, he arrived at the conclusion that the universe has a mathematically logical structure and that a single method of reasoning could apply to all natural sciences, providing a unified body of knowledge. This theory was developed on November 10, 1619 in Ulm, Germany.
             From 1626 to 1629 Descartes lived mostly in Paris. But he thought the pressures of social life kept him from his work, so he then moved to Holland in search of seclusion. He developed his first major work, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, at his new, more private home in Holland.
             Between 1637 to 1644, Descartes produced his three most important philosophical works, the Discourse on Method which was a preface to his Optics, Meteors, Geometry, and the Principals of Philosophy. The Discourse on...