History of Coordinate Geometry

The Cartesian system or the rectangular coordinate system was invented in seventeenth century by Rene Descartes, the great French philosopher and mathematician.

The coordinate system is also called the Cartesian system.

Geometry was well developed to describe the dimension of an object, but it does not describe the position of an object. So, to describe the position of an object, we need a system.

Rene Descartes liked to stay in bed until late and think. One day when he was resting in bed he was watching a fly on the ceiling from his bed. He wondered and tried to describe the path of fly’s location along crisscross beams of the ceiling.

He then took a piece of paper and imagined the ceiling as a rectangle. Drawn on a piece of paper, the left bottom corner as a reference point and specify the location of fly by measuring how far it need to go in the horizontal direction and how far it need to go in vertical direction to get to it.

These two numbers are fly’s coordinates. On the ceiling, every point comes with a specific unique point and every pair of the coordinates is a unique pair.

This idea made it possible to extend the two sides of the room(axes) to become infinitely long in both directions.

So this way using negative numbers to label the bottom part of the vertical axis and the left part of the horizontal axis and therefore, the position that specifies all points on an infinite plane.

Descartes coordinate system created a link between algebra and geometry. In honor of his work, the coordinates of a point are often referred to as its Cartesian coordinates, and the coordinate plane as the Cartesian coordinate plane.

So the credit goes to Descartes to solve the problem describing the position of a point in a plane. He designed Cartesian system.

Now we are familiar with the horizontal number line and vertical number line, Geometrical shapes such as circles could be described algebrically using the coordinates of the points that make the shape.

Descartes coordinate system created a link between algebra and geometry and now it is possible to solve geometric problems using algebra.