Rene Descartes. Engraving of Renes Descartes (1596-1650), French mathematician, teaching astro- nomy to Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes acce- pte
Rene Descartes. Engraving of Renes Descartes (1596-1650), French mathematician, teaching astro- nomy to Queen Christina of Sweden. Descartes acce- pted a post at Christina's court in Stockholm in September 1649. Christina, aged 19, was energetic & eccentric and insisted that Descartes teach her three times a week at five o'clock in the morning. Descartes had habitually never risen from bed before 11am and had also suffered from ill-health throughout his life. The early, cold mornings caused him to catch pneumonia and he was dead by February 1650. In astronomy, Descartes tried unsuccessfully to find a compromise between the cosmological work of Ptolemy and Copernicus.
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Keywords: astronomer, christina, descartes, mathematician, portraits, queen, rene, surname, sweden
