What is the history of the rectangular coordinate system?

Answer 1

The adjective Cartesian refers to the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (who used the name Cartesius in Latin). The idea of this system was developed in 1637 in two writings by Descartes and independently by Pierre de Fermat, although Fermat used 3 dimensions and did not publish the discovery.[1] In part two of his Discourse on Method, Descartes introduces the new idea of specifying the position of a point or object on a surface, using two intersecting axes as measuring guides.[citation needed] In La Géométrie, he further explores the above-mentioned concepts.[2] It may be interesting to note that some have indicated that the master artists of the Renaissance used a grid, in the form of a wire mesh, as a tool for breaking up the component parts of their subjects they painted. That this may have influenced Descartes is merely speculative.[citation needed] (See perspective, projective geometry.) Representing a vector in the standard basis. The development of the Cartesian coordinate system enabled the development of calculus by Isaac newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz.[3] Many other coordinate systems have been developed since Descartes, such as the polar coordinates for the plane, and the spherical and cylindrical coordinaes for three-dimensional space.