| Descartes (dā-kärt') Pronunciation Key
French mathematician and philosopher who discovered that the position of a point can be determined by coordinates, a discovery that laid the foundation for analytic geometry. |
A seventeenth-century French philosopher. He is known for his statement “I think; therefore I am.” Descartes relied on reason to explain the workings of the universe; his ideas are often called “Cartesianism,” after the Latin form of his name.
| a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal. |
| a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question. |