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17th century
- The coordinate system we commonly use is called the Cartesian system, after the French mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650), who developed it in the 17th century. Legend has it that Descartes, who liked to stay in bed until late, was watching a fly on the ceiling from his bed.
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Coordinate system, Arrangement of reference lines or curves used to identify the location of points in space. In two dimensions, the most common system is the Cartesian (after René Descartes) system.
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The invention of a geographic coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene, who composed his now-lost Geography at the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC. A century later, Hipparchus of Nicaea improved on this system by determining latitude from stellar measurements rather than solar altitude and determining ...
In geometry, a coordinate system is a system that uses one or more numbers, or coordinates, to uniquely determine the position of the points or other geometric elements on a manifold such as Euclidean space.
The system of coordinates that Descartes invented is used in many modern applications. For example, on any map the location of a country or a city is usually given as a set of coordinates. The location of a ship at sea is determined by longitude and latitude, which is an application of the coordinate system to the curved surface of Earth.
Cartesian coordinates are named for René Descartes, whose invention of them in the 17th century revolutionized mathematics by allowing the expression of problems of geometry in terms of algebra and calculus.
History of Mathematics. René Descartes ©Frans Hals. 1637 Jan 1. Cartesian Coordinate System. Netherlands. The Cartesian refers to the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, who published this idea in 1637 while he was resident in the Netherlands.