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One other needs mention, not because of design skill but because of his fundemental
understanding of the art of problem solving: the core of Architectural ability.
René Descartes (1596-1650) was a philosopher whose work, La géométrie,
includes his application of algebra to geometry from which we now have Cartesian
geometry.
While
in school his health was poor and he was granted permission
to remain in bed until 11 o'clock in the morning, a custom
he maintained until the year of his death. School had made
Descartes understand how little he knew, the only subject
which was satisfactory in his eyes was mathematics. This idea
became the foundation for his way of thinking, and was to
form the basis for all his works.
Descartes was pressed by
his friends to publish his ideas and he wrote a treatise on science under the
title Discours de la méthod pour bien conduire sa raison et chercher la vérité
dans les sciences. Three appendices to this work were La Dioptrique,
Les Météores, and La Géométrie.
The work describes what
Descartes considers is a more satisfactory means of acquiring knowledge than
that presented by Aristotle's logic.
Descartes' Meditations
on First Philosophy, was published in 1641, designed for the philosopher
and for the theologian. It consists of six meditations, Of the Things that we
may doubt, Of the Nature of the Human Mind, Of God: that He exists, Of Truth
and Error, Of the Essence of Material Things, Of the Existence of Material Things
and of the Real Distinction between the Mind and the Body of Man.
The thing that should be
taught to every student at an early age regards his discourse on method: a step-by-step
guide to problem solving which can be applied universally from problems such
as preventing moisture damage in buildings to buying a new car:
| The first
. . . .to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognize to be so; that
is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to
accept in them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and
distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it. The second was to divide
up each of the difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible, and
as seemed requisite in order that it might be resolved in the best manner possible.
The third was to carry on my reflections in due order, commencing with objects
that were the most simple and easy to understand, in order to rise little by little,
or by degrees, to knowledge of the most complex, assuming an order, even if a
fictitious one, among those which do not follow a natural sequence relatively
to one another. The last was in all cases to make enumerations so complete and
reviews so general that I should be certain of having omitted nothing. |
In 1649 Queen Christina
of Sweden persuaded Descartes to go to Stockholm. However the Queen wanted to
draw tangents at 5 a.m. and Descartes broke the habit of his lifetime of getting
up at 11 o'clock. After only a few months in the cold northern climate, walking
to the palace for 5 o'clock every morning, he died of pneumonia.
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