The decision to target the Apollo 16 lunar landing for the highlands region of the Moon was made to obtain samples of the Descartes Formation and the Cayley Formation.

At Descartes, the Cayley and Descartes formations were the primary areas of interest in that scientists suspected, based on telescopic and orbital imagery, that the terrain found there was formed by magma more viscous than that which formed the lunar maria.

It was ultimately decided to target the Apollo 16 mission to the Descartes site.

With the assistance of orbital photography obtained on the Apollo 14 mission, the Descartes site was determined to be safe enough for a manned landing.

The eleventh century Persian mathematician Omar Khayyám saw a strong relationship between geometry and algebra, and was moving in the right direction when he helped to close the gap between numerical and geometric algebra with his geometric solution of the general cubic equations, but the decisive step came later with Descartes.

Although not published in his lifetime, a manuscript form of Ad locos planos et solidos isagoge ( Introduction to Plane and Solid Loci ) was circulating in Paris in 1637, just prior to the publication of Descartes ' Discourse.

Thābit's formula was rediscovered by Fermat ( 1601 – 1665 ) and Descartes ( 1596 – 1650 ), to whom it is sometimes ascribed, and extended by Euler ( 1707 – 1783 ).

Pascal's work was so precocious that Descartes was convinced that Pascal's father had written it.

When assured by Mersenne that it was, indeed, the product of the son not the father, Descartes dismissed it with a sniff: " I do not find it strange that he has offered demonstrations about conics more appropriate than those of the ancients ," adding, " but other matters related to this subject can be proposed that would scarcely occur to a sixteen-year-old child.

The dominant view Newton opposed was devised by René Descartes, and was supported ( in part ) by Gottfried Leibniz.

Descartes recognized that there would be a real difference, however, between a situation in which a body with movable parts and originally at rest with respect to a surrounding ring was itself accelerated to a certain angular velocity with respect to the ring, and another situation in which the surrounding ring was given a contrary acceleration with respect to the central object.

The first influential philosopher to discuss this question specifically was Descartes, and the answer he gave is known as Cartesian dualism.

Although the idea expressed in Cogito ergo sum is widely attributed to Descartes, he was not the first to mention it.

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.

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 phrase " Cogito ergo sum " ( I think, therefore I am ) is also commonly associated with Descartes ' theory, because in his own methodological doubt, doubting everything he previously knew in order to start from a blank slate, the first thing that he could not logically bring himself to doubt was his own existence: " I do not exist " would be a contradiction in terms ; the act of saying that one does not exist assumes that someone must be making the statement in the first place.

Though Descartes could doubt his senses, his body and the world around him, he could not deny his own existence, because he was able to doubt and must exist in order to do so.

Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness.

The use and meaning of the word " philosophy " has changed throughout history: in Antiquity it encompassed almost any inquiry ; for Descartes it was supposed to be the Queen of the Sciences, a sort of ultimate justification ; in the time of David Hume " metaphysics " and " morals " could be roughly translated as the human sciences ; and contemporary analytic philosophy likes to define itself roughly as inquiry into concepts.

Descartes believed that thought ( subjectivity ) was the essence of the mind, and that extension ( the occupation of space ) was the essence of matter.

In other words, the only claim that is indubitable here is the agent-independent claim that there is cognitive activity present The objection, as presented by Georg Lichtenberg, is that rather than supposing an entity that is thinking, Descartes should have said: " thinking is occurring.

While in the service of the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, Descartes was present at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, in November 1620.

In present day discussions on the practice of animal vivisection, it is normal to consider Descartes as an advocate of this practice, as a result of his dualistic philosophy.

Like René Descartes, Malebranche held that humans attain knowledge through ideas – immaterial representations present to the mind.

Thus, in Descartes work, we can see some of the fundamental assumptions of modern cosmology in evidence-the project of examing the historical construction of the universe through a set of quantitative laws describing interactions which would allow the ordered present to be constructed from a chaotic past.

* René Descartes is present at the Siege of La Rochelle.

Descartes says that he is asking the protection of the Faculty for his work, and to this end he writes the present dedication.

Partly in consequence, there is ' at present introduced by literature such as Damasio's Descartes ' Error ... a trend to include ( or rather rehabilitate ) the body and its movement into the research of the social and behavioral sciences '.

Ampère claimed that " at eighteen years he found three culminating points in his life, his First Communion, the reading of Antoine Leonard Thomas's " Eulogy of Descartes ", and the Taking of the Bastille.

Here is an everyday experience of the basic nature of the Descartes experiment: Consider sitting in your train and noticing a train originally at rest beside you in the railway station pulling away.

Letters from the beginning of the alphabet like a, b, c ... often denote constants in the context of the discussion at hand, while letters from the end of the alphabet, like ... x, y, z, are usually reserved for the variables, a convention initiated by Descartes.

He found the works of modern philosophers, such as René Descartes, more interesting than the classical material taught at the university.

At the age of thirteen he enrolled at the University of Basel, and in 1723, received his Master of Philosophy with a dissertation that compared the philosophies of Descartes and Newton.

He died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes.

A vague meaning at first ; the vogue for the word ( used until late 18th century only in Latin form ) can be traced to the philosophy of Descartes.

Graduation registry for Descartes at the Prytanee | Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand, La Flèche, 1616

In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helena Jans van der Strom, with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer, at which time Descartes taught at the Utrecht University.

In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes began his long correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, devoted mainly to moral and psychological subjects.

Descartes was interviewed by Frans Burman at Egmond-Binnen in 1648.

Descartes stayed at the French ambassador Pierre Chanut.

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists.

René Descartes at work

Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland.

The moral writings of Descartes came at the last part of his life, but earlier, in his Discourse on Method he adopted three maxims to be able to act while he put all his ideas into doubt.

Principia philosophiae ( Principles of Philosophy ), a Latin textbook at first intended by Descartes to replace the Aristotelian textbooks then used in universities.

* Original texts of René Descartes in French at La Philosophie

* The Philosophical Works Of Descartes Volume II ( 1934 ) at archive. org

** René Descartes, at age 20, graduates in civil and canon law at the University of Poitiers, where he becomes disillusioned with books, preferring to seek truths from " le grand livre du monde.