I learned something from the Grade 6 text book the other day. It's so good to know that we can always learn new things. I love it best when I learn things from young people, but, as math person, it was kind of fun to learn from the Grade 6 math textbook too.
We graph things using what we call the Cartesian plane. It's an x-y grid where the x-axis is horizontal and the y-axis is vertical, and points have an x- and y-coordinate, so (3, 5) would be a point 3 units to the right of the centre "origin" and 5 units up from it.
But where did that name, the Cartesian plane, come from?
Well, there was this mathematician named Descartes. That I knew, but I never that the made the connection Cartesian Plane is named after him. It is! Rene Descartes was his name, he was a French mathematician, was born in 1596 and died in 1650. As with many learned folks back then, he did not restrict himself to one discipline. As well as being a mathematician he was a philosopher and scientist. For the math world, he was the person who developed the grid system that we now call the Cartesian plan. Thank you M Descartes!