Why Use Coordinates?

René Descartes was a French mathematician who published his influential book Discourse on Method in 1637. In it Descartes rejected traditional Aristotelian philosophy. It also contains his famous quote, "I think, therefore I am." For Descartes, method was analysis, going from self-evident truths step-by-step to more distant and more general truths.

He wrote his Geometry as an application of his method. His attempts to unify algebra and geometry influenced the creation of what became coordinate geometry (hence the name Cartesian plane). Thus he influenced the development of calculus (functions, derivatives and integrals) by Newton and Leibniz in the next generation.