History
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 writings by Descartes and independently by Pierre de Fermat, although Fermat also worked in three dimensions, and did not publish the discovery. Both authors used a single axis in their treatments and have a variable length measured in reference to this axis. The concept of using a pair of axes was introduced in later work by commentators who were trying to clarify the ideas contained in Descartes' La Géométrie.
The development of the Cartesian coordinate system would play an intrinsic role in the development of the calculus by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
Nicole Oresme, a French cleric and friend of the dauphin (later to become King Charles V) of the 14th Century, used constructions similar to Cartesian coordinates well before the time of Descartes and Fermat.
Many other coordinate systems have been developed since Descartes, such as the polar coordinates for the plane, and the spherical and cylindrical coordinates for three-dimensional space.
Read more about this topic: Cartesian Coordinate System
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