Pāhonoa te oro

Every time you see an x–y graph in mathematics, you are actually using an idea created almost four hundred years ago. And the man behind this idea was René Descartes. René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye in France. Today the town is even renamed Descartes in his honor. As a child he was curious and loved studying mathematics and philosophy. He studied at the famous Jesuit college of La Flèche, one of the best schools in Europe at that time, where he learned logic, physics, and