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Descartes' rule of signs. In mathematics, Descartes' rule of signs, first described by René Descartes in his work La Géométrie, is a technique for getting information on the number of positive real roots of a polynomial. It asserts that the number of positive roots is at most the number of sign changes in the sequence of polynomial's ...
Regulae ad directionem ingenii, or Rules for the Direction of the Mind is an unfinished treatise regarding the proper method for scientific and philosophical thinking by René Descartes. Descartes started writing the work in 1628, and it was eventually published in 1701 after Descartes' death. [1] This treatise outlined the basis for his later ...
René Descartes ( / deɪˈkɑːrt / day-KART or UK: / ˈdeɪkɑːrt / DAY-kart; French: [ʁəne dekaʁt] ⓘ; Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; [note 3] [11] 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) [12] [13] [14] : 58 was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and ...
An imaginary number is the product of a real number and the imaginary unit i, [note 1] which is defined by its property i2 = −1. [1] [2] The square of an imaginary number bi is −b2. For example, 5i is an imaginary number, and its square is −25. The number zero is considered to be both real and imaginary. [3]
In geometry, Descartes' theorem states that for every four kissing, or mutually tangent, circles, the radii of the circles satisfy a certain quadratic equation. By solving this equation, one can construct a fourth circle tangent to three given, mutually tangent circles. The theorem is named after René Descartes, who stated it in 1643.
In mathematics, the logarithm is the inverse function to exponentiation. That means that the logarithm of a number x to the base b is the exponent to which b must be raised to produce x. For example, since 1000 = 103, the logarithm base of 1000 is 3, or log10 (1000) = 3.
La Géométrie. The work was the first to propose the idea of uniting algebra and geometry into a single subject [2] and invented an algebraic geometry called analytic geometry, which involves reducing geometry to a form of arithmetic and algebra and translating geometric shapes into algebraic equations. For its time this was ground-breaking.
The history of logarithms is the story of a correspondence (in modern terms, a group isomorphism) between multiplication on the positive real numbers and addition on the real number line that was formalized in seventeenth century Europe and was widely used to simplify calculation until the advent of the digital computer.