René Descartes

René Descartes was born in La Haye, France, and was educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, where he was allowed to stay in bed late in the morning because of poor health, a habit he kept for life. He studied law but decided to learn from the great book of the world, and served as a volunteer soldier. In November 1619, in Germany, he had a series of dreams that convinced him to build all knowledge on a certain foundation, like mathematics. He spent most of his adult life in the Netherlands. In his Discourse on Method of 1637 and Meditations of 1641 he resolved to doubt everything that could be doubted, and found one thing he could not doubt: that he was thinking. I think, therefore I am. From there he argued for the existence of God and of the material world. He invented the coordinate system that links algebra and geometry, still called Cartesian, and wrote on optics and the body. In 1649 Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm, where he caught pneumonia and died in 1650.

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Faith: A Roman Catholic, educated at the Jesuit College of La Flèche. Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy