Greatest geniuses of all time
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The archetypal "Renaissance Man," Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest scientific minds as well as one of the greatest visual artists the human race has ever produced. The illegitimate son of a wealthy Florentine notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman named Caterina, Leonardo was born in Tuscany on April 15, 1452, in Anchiano, a town near Vinci, which is in the proximity of Florence.
When he was about 17 years old, Leonardo was apprenticed as a garzone or studio boy to the workshop of the Renaissance master Andrea Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painter and artist of his day. From roughly 1469 to 1476, Leonardo acquired a variety of skills during his apprenticeship at Verrocchio's workshop, including painting altarpieces and panel pictures and making large sculptures in bronze and marble. In 1472, he joined the painters' guild, and six years later, he became an independent master. His first commission was in 1478, to paint an altarpiece for the Palazzo Vecchio's chapel. The painting was never executed. Florence's Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto commissioned Leonardo's first large painting in 1481. 'The Adoration of the Magi' was left unfinished when Leonardo left Florence for Milan approximately a year later, to work for Duke Lodovico Sforza as court artist and as an engineer.
Leonardo had written the Duke of Milan touting his skills as a military engineer. In his letter, Leonardo claimed that he could build portable bridges, manufacture cannon, and build ships and war machines, including armored vehicles and catapults. He also told the Duke he could sculpt in bronze, clay and marble. He worked for the Duke of Milan for almost 18 years, painting portraits, designing festivals, and planning to sculpt a massive equestrian monument to honor the Duke's father. In addition to serving the duke as an architect and working for him as a military engineer, Leonardo assisted the mathematician Luca Pacioli in the celebrated work Divina Proportione.
Leonardo's interest in science began to flourish in Milan, and as a civil and military engineer, he delved into the field of mechanics. His scientific research also embraced anatomy, biology, mathematics, and physics. It was during this period that he finished "The Last Supper," which along with the "Mona Lisa," is his most significant masterpiece.
France captured Milan in 1499, and Leonardo moved to Mantua and then to Venice to seek employment. By April 1500, he had returned to Florence, though two years later, he left to work for Cesare Borgia, the Duke of Romagna, in a military capacity. The son of Pope Alexander VI, Borgia served his father as his general in-chief. Leonardo. as the duke's chief architect and engineer, supervised construction on forts in the Papal states in central Italy.
Back in Florence in 1503, Leonardo served on the art commission of artists that determined the proper placing of Michelangelo's sculpture 'David.' Florence was at war with Pisa, and Leonardo served the city-state as a military engineer while continuing his scientific research. Leonardo began to design a painting for the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio to commemorate the Battle of Anghiari, a Florentine victory over Pisa. While Leonardo produced a full-size sketch in 1505, he never executed the wall painting. During his second residency in Florence, Leonardo painted the portrait 'La Giocondane,' more famously known as Mona Lisa. Leonardo apparently was quite fond of the completed work, as it accompanied him on all of his subsequent travels.
Arguably the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa is a bravura technical performance. The innovative Leonardo exhibits his mastery of chiaroscuro, the technique of modeling and defining form through contrasts of light and shadow, and sfumato, the technique of using subtle transitions between areas of color. The Mona Lisa, like many of his paintings, features a landscape background utilizing atmospheric perspective. Leonardo was one of the first painters to introduce atmospheric perspective into art, and his work influenced the High Renaissance Florentine masters, including Raphael. He also was a major influence on the artistic development of Correggio.
Returning to Milan in June 1506, at the invitation of French governor Charles d'Amboise, Leonardo went to work for the French court, which with King Louis XII of France, was residing in the Italian city. Except for a sojourn back in Florence in the period 1507-08, Leonardo stayed in Milan for seven years, though he returned to Florence often to visit his half-brothers and -siters and to manage his inheritance. In 1507, Leonardo went was named court painter to King Louis XII.
In Milan, he worked on engineering projects and on the planning of an equestrian statue to honor Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the French military commander of Milan. The statue was never realized. During this Milan stay, scientific research became paramount. He applied his artistic gifts toward scientific illustration. In addition to his study of anatomy, he studied the stratification of rocks and researched the principles behind light, the flow of water, and the growth of plants. Leonardo's method was to draw and describe things by first approaching the surface before delving in to the underlying structure. He was interested in exactly describing the appearance of natural things in order to analyze their functioning. Similar to his artistic innovations, Leonardo's scientific theories were based on careful observation, precisely documented. He also made sketches of mechanical devices for the transmission of energy.
Along with Giuliano de'Medici, the brother of Pope Leo X, Leonardo moved to Rome in 1514. Enjoying the patronage of Pope Leo X, he lived in the Palazzo Belvedere in the Vatican and was mostly concerned with scientific experimentation. In 1516, he left Italy and moved to France to become the architectural adviser of King Francis I, an admirer of his work. Leonardo lived at the Château de Cloux, near Amboise, France, where he died on May 2, 1519 at at the age of 67.- Nikola Tesla (28 June 1856 - 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
Born and raised in the Austrian Empire, Tesla studied engineering and physics in the 1870s without receiving a degree, gaining practical experience in the early 1880s working in telephony and at Continental Edison in the new electric power industry. In 1884 he emigrated to the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. He worked for a short time at the Edison Machine Works in New York City before he struck out on his own. With the help of partners to finance and market his ideas, Tesla set up laboratories and companies in New York to develop a range of electrical and mechanical devices. His alternating current (AC) induction motor and related poly-phase AC patents, licensed by Westinghouse Electric in 1888, earned him a considerable amount of money and became the cornerstone of the poly-phase system which that company eventually marketed.
Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wireless-controlled boat, one of the first-ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.
After Wardenclyffe, Tesla experimented with a series of inventions in the 1910s and 1920s with varying degrees of success. Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died in New York City in January 1943. Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity following his death, until 1960, when the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the Tesla in his honor. There has been a resurgence in popular interest in Tesla since the 1990s. - Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg, to a German Jewish family. He was the son of Pauline (Koch) and Hermann Einstein, a featherbed salesman. Albert began reading and studying science at a young age, and he graduated from a Swiss high school when he was 17. He then attended a Swiss Polytechnic, where he met his first wife. He graduated in 1900, and became a Swiss citizen in 1901. He began working at the Swiss Patent Office and continued his scientific studies. He taught at universities in Prague, Zurich, and Berlin, and continued his research in physics. The onset of World War II led him to move to the United States, and he was granted a post at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey. Einstein was heavily involved in attempting to bring about world peace in his later life, and he continued his scientific research until his death in 1955.
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Friedrich Nietzsche was raised having five women around him - his mother, grandmother, two aunts and a sister, all living together. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when Nietzsche was 5 years old. After a Catholic school he studied music and Greco-Roman culture at the famous Schulpfora from 1858-1864, continued at the universities of Bonn, Leipzig and Basel, where he was a professor of classic philology for 12 years. His influences were: classic history, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jesus Christ, whom he called "Superman".
His main books are "The Gay Science", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil", "Twilight of the Idols" and the radical "Antichrist". Nietzsche analyzed foundations of values and morality through transformations of human nature and society. His contention that traditional values, religion and God, are not working in the modernized world, led to his conceptual statement: "God is dead." In replacement of God comes his concept of a superman - a rational, secure and highly independent individual. He lists Jesus, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Goethe and Napoleon as models or prototypes of a superman. His idealistic superman was often misinterpreted as a role for a dictator in a totalitarian society. Nitzsche's goal for this concept was mainly individualistic because of his despise of any crowd and attention to him. He considered any crowd as a main source of lies and manipulations. According to Nietzsche it is the independence that allows a superman to be truly original and creative.
His sarcastic humor and contradictory ideas, often misunderstood in metaphysical context, caused misinterpretations of his personality and his works. His nihilism resulted from frustrations in search of meaning. For self-liberation Nietzsche terminated his German citizenship and remained a stateless person for the rest of his life. He distanced himself from Richard Wagner being repelled by the banality of the Bayreuth shows and the baseness of the crowd. He suffered from migraine headaches and from shortsightedness to the degree of blindness that caused his retirement from University of Basel. After he saw a brutal beating of a horse on a street, Nitzsche had a mental breakdown at age 44, and he retreated into solitude as a self-defense from crowds and manipulations. He lived with his mother and sister until his death of pneumonia in 1900. Most researchers regard his breakdown as irrelevant to his works. He received postmortem recognition by existentialists and by 20th century postmodern philosophers.
Nietzsche's idea of a day in a life repeating itself again, and again, and again was written at the end of the Book IV of "The Gay Science" (1887). It is used in the film 'Groundhog Day (1993)'.
Nietzsche listed laughter and humor as vital qualities of being a superman. He only failed to add a superwoman on his list of models to make it really serious.- Writer
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William Shakespeare's birthdate is assumed from his baptism on April 25. His father John was the son of a farmer who became a successful tradesman; his mother Mary Arden was gentry. He studied Latin works at Stratford Grammar School, leaving at about age 15. About this time his father suffered an unknown financial setback, though the family home remained in his possession. An affair with Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and a nearby farmer's daughter, led to pregnancy and a hasty marriage late in 1582. Susanna was born in May of 1583, twins Hamnet and Judith in January of 1585. By 1592 he was an established actor and playwright in London though his "career path" afterward (fugitive? butcher? soldier? actor?) is highly debated. When plague closed the London theatres for two years he apparently toured; he also wrote two long poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". He may have spent this time at the estate of the Earl of Southampton. By December 1594 he was back in London as a member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company he stayed with the rest of his life. In 1596 he seems to have purchased a coat of arms for his father; the same year Hamnet died at age 11. The following year he purchased the grand Stratford mansion New Place. A 1598 edition of "Love's Labors" was the first to bear his name, though he was already regarded as England's greatest playwright. He is believed to have written his "Sonnets" during the 1590s. In 1599 he became a partner in the new Globe Theatre, the company of which joined the royal household on the accession of James in 1603. That is the last year in which he appeared in a cast list. He seems to have retired to Stratford in 1612, where he continued to be active in real estate investment. The cause of his death is unknown.- Arthur Shopenhauer was a German philosopher and one of the greatest thinkers ever. Schopenhauer created his own original philosophical conception by merging elements from the philosophies of Plato and Kant with the suggestion exercised by oriental doctrines, characterized by a strong pessimism, which had an extraordinary influence, on subsequent philosophers, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, and, in general, on European culture, entering the current of philosophies of life.
- One of the greatest Greek philosophers (considered the greatest Greek writer of prose by some), Plato, was born into an aristocratic Athenian family. He met Socrates around 407 BC and became his disciple in philosophy. Socrates was executed in 399 BC. Plato and fellow disciples took refuge under Euclid in Megara. Following that for a period of 12 years Plato traveled extensively to Egypt, Sicily and Italy. He met Dionysius I of Syracuse in 390 BC. And the Pythagorean mathematician Archytas of Taras (Tarentum) while in Italy, who was a follower of the semi-legendary Pythagoras of Samos (6th Cent. B.C.). He began teaching pupils near the grove of Academus outside Athens in 388 BC. His school was named Academy after the place. Plato was summoned to the court of Dionysuis II of Syracuse by Dion, the ruler's uncle, in 366 BC, and by Dionysius II himself in 362 BC. Plato's philosophical and literary activities extend over a period of 50 years. His main works falls into 2 categories viz. letters and dialogs. The 13 letters are mainly addressed to Dionysus the Tyrant of Syracuse and deal with political advice. The 26 dialogs fall into 3 broad categories - early, middle and late based on his travels. The more well known include the Protagoras, Gorgias, Ion, the Republic (where he attacks the power and pretension of literature), Cratylus, Phaedrus, Sophist and Laws. His death is reported by some authorities as having occurred at a wedding feast or while he was writing. He was buried at the Academy.
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Johann Wolfgang Goethe was born on 28 August 1749 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany as son of a lawyer. After growing up in a privileged upper middle class family, he studied law in Leipzig from 1765 to 1768, although he was more interested in literature. As he was seriously ill, he had to interrupt his studies, but finally graduated in Strassburg with a degree in law. In the following years, his novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774) became one of the first bestsellers, making him a key author in the "Sturm und Drang" (Storm and Stress) movement. In 1775, he settled down in Weimar, being the Duke's adviser and writing popular dramas such as "Egmont" or "Torquato Tasso". One of his life's important milestones was the Italian Journey from 1786 and 1788, where he discovered his interest in Greek and Roman classicism. After his return to Germany, he began the "Weimar Classicism" movement with his good friend Friedrich Schiller, concentrating on poems and dramas such as his best known work "Faust", which he published in two parts (1808/1832). Beside his literary work, he contributed many interesting theories to sciences, making him Germany's leading polymath in that period. On 22 March 1832, he died in Weimar, the town he had lived for more than fifty years.- Writer
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Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 into the lower nobility of Florence, to Alighiero di Bellincione d'Alighiero, a moneylender. A precocious student, Dante's education focused on rhetoric and grammar. He also became enamored with a young girl, Beatrice Portinari, whose death in 1290 threw a grieving Dante into intense religious studies. Though the Alighieri family had managed to avoid entanglement in the power struggles between the Ghibelline and Guelf families for control of Florence, Dante allied himself with the democratic Guelfs and married a member of that clan, Gemma di Manetto Donati, in 1285.
After serving in the Guelf forces as a cavalryman in the Battle of Campaldino, Dante enrolled in the Guild of Doctors and Pharmacists and became politically active. He became an ambassador and a prior, but after finding himself on the opposite side of the political party in power he was forced to flee Florence in 1301, never able to return to the city of his birth. He narrowly escaped being executed for treason.
Dante left for Verona and Ravenna, where he was joined by his children. He then wrote his most famous work, "Commedia", not in scholarly Latin but in the vernacular Italian of the time, giving his countrymen a literature of their own. In it he would resurrect the love of his youth, Beatrice, giving her a place among the angels. This work would also take the author, escorted by the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro, on a grand tour to Hell and Purgatory, and later by his beloved Beatrice to Paradise. History would later judge Dante's creation to be divine. Dante Alighieri died in 1321 and was buried in Ravenna. Three sons--Pietro, Jacopo and Giovanni--and a daughter, Antonia, survived him.- Music Department
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Beethoven was the child of a Flamian musician family and became a member of the electoral orchestra of Bonn in 1783. In 1787 he studied at Mozart's in Vienna and in 1792 he moved all to Vienna becoming a student of Joseph Haydn. The Vienna High Society loved him as a piano player as well as as composer. In 1802 his deafness became serious making Beethoven a real eccentric until his death in 1827.- Music Department
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart grew up in Salzburg under the regulation of his strict father Leopold who also was a famous composer of his time. His abilities in music were obvious even when Mozart was still young so that in 1762 at the age of six, his father took him with his elder sister on a concert tour to Munich and Vienna and a second one from 1763-66 through the south of Germany, Paris and London. Mozart was celebrated as a wonder child everywhere because of his excellent piano playing and his improvisations.
In 1769 he became the concertmaster of the Archbishop and was knighted by the Pope in Rome. Working in Salzburg he nevertheless travelled around Europe to meet other composers and orchestras. But in 1781 after a dispute with the Archbishop he left Salzburg and went to Vienna where he married Constanze Weber from Mannheim. In Vienna he also started his friendship with Joseph Haydn and a time of many work pieces. In the last year of his life, for example, he wrote one of his masterpieces, "Die Zauberflöte". Although some of his operas were successful he could not make money from this and died in poverty at the age of 36, having even on his last day worked on a "Requiem". He was buried in a communal grave which could not be precisely identified years later.- Immanuel Kant was born the fourth of ten children in a family of craftsmen in Königsberg.
Between 1732 and 1740 Kant attended the Friedrichskollegium in Königsberg. In 1737 his mother died. After leaving school, he studied natural sciences, mathematics, philosophy, theology and classical Latin literature at the Albertina University in Königsberg from 1740 to 1745. His father died in 1745, shortly before completing his studies. While he was still studying and doing his doctorate, Immanuel Kant worked as a tutor and tutor in the area around Königsberg to secure his family's livelihood. During this time he also published his first natural-philosophical texts such as "Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces" (1749). After this time, Kant never left Konigsberg for the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, he later led a sociable life. In the scientific, anonymously published work "General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens" (1755), Kant deals with the formation of the planetary system according to Newton's principles. In 1755 he completed his doctorate with a thesis on fire entitled "De igne". In the same year he completed his habilitation thesis "Nova Dilucidatio", a treatise on metaphysical principles, and began teaching as a private lecturer at the Albertina. His lecture subjects were varied: logic, ethics, metaphysics, mathematics, natural law, philosophical encyclopedia, pedagogy, mechanics, theology and anthropology. Kant's lectures were well attended. Again and again he tried to get a full professorship at the university, but this was rejected for a long time despite his high qualifications.
In the years from 1758 to 1762 Königsberg was occupied by the Russians. This period brought with it a relaxed social atmosphere in which Kant took part. He turned down a professorship for poetry at the Albertina. In 1766, in addition to his income from hearing aids and private tuition, he found another source of income when he accepted the position of assistant librarian at the royal palace library. He also declined an appointment at the University of Erlangen as a professor for logic and metaphysics, as well as that at the University of Jena. It was not until 1770 that Kant received a full professorship in logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. In his inaugural lecture, he spoke about the topic "Sensual and Intelligible World". Here Kant separates sensual and intelligent knowledge, space and time are recognized as subjective forms of perception.
The topic of his inaugural speech became the basis for his main work "Critique of Pure Reason" (1781), on which he had worked for ten years. This was followed at shorter intervals by further critical writings such as "Critique of Practical Reason" (1788) or "Critique of Judgment" (1790). These works were intended as the cornerstone for an overall system of his philosophy, which, however, was only partially implemented. His article "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment", which appeared in the Berlin Monthly Magazine in 1784, became famous, as did Kant's catchy answer, which he summed up: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-inflicted immaturity". "The Critique of Pure Reason" surprised the reading public. The edition, of which another edition with changes appeared in 1787, was difficult to understand.
Kant remedied this by writing a more accessible edition in 1783 entitled "Prolegomena to any future metaphysics". In 1790 his writing "About a discovery according to which all new criticism of pure reason should be made superfluous by an older one" came out as a defense against school-philosophical attacks from the Leipniz-Wolffian corner. In 1786 Kant became a member of the Academy of Sciences. In 1795 his writing "Perpetual Peace" was published. In it Kant presents a utopian draft of a League of Nations. The work became a success. Two periods were recognizable in Kant's work: the pre-critical and, after the publication of his main work "Critique of Pure Reason" in 1781, the critical creative phase. The following stages of development became noticeable:
In his scientific phase from 1747 to 1755 he laid the foundation for his later theory of development. In his metaphysical phase he turned away from traditional Wolffian teaching and advocated a critical metaphysics. His critical philosophy began with his main work, followed by the stage of the post-critical creative period, including the work "Opus postumum", which was only published in 1938 and which combines Kant's criticism and the metaphysics of idealism. In his practical philosophy, Kant sees the "categorical imperative" as the supreme justification principle for morality and norms of action: "Only act according to that maxim through which you can also want it to become general law." In 1796 Kant gave his last lecture.
Immanuel Kant died in Koenigsberg on February 12, 1804. - Soundtrack
His father had died before he was born. At the age of three he was sent to his grandmother, with whom he grew up until he was ten. Newton then returned to his mother. He attended school in nearby Grantham. From 1665 he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Among other things, he was taught there by the theologian, philologist and mathematician Isaac Barrow. In January 1665, Newton received his baccalaureate (high school diploma). An outbreak of bubonic plague led to the college's closure. Newton returned to his parents' home in Woolsthorpe. During this time he worked on infinitesimal calculus, the nature of light and gravity. It was not until 1667 that he resumed his studies at Cambridge. He dealt with the works of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Robert Boyle. Newton's development of infinitesimal calculus (fluxion calculus) was groundbreaking in mathematics, as previously one could only deal with fixed quantities such as numbers. Newton's development opened up the possibility of expressing time-varying quantities such as physical forces or speeds in numbers.
Independently of Newton, the philosopher, mathematician and researcher Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz developed a solution to this mathematical problem around the same time through his differential and integral calculus. Its naming as infinitesimal calculus ultimately prevailed. In 1669, Newton improved the telescope into a reflecting telescope by using inwardly curved lenses to concentrate light. In the same year he became a professor at Cambridge; He thus succeeded his teacher Barrow. In 1671 he demonstrated his invention to the London Royal Society. Newton presented his first scientific publication on the discovery of the nature of light to the Royal Society in 1672. In the same year he became a member. He was able to prove experimentally that white light consists of a mixture of colored light components. In doing so, he contradicted the previously common view that colored light was complex and white light was simple. Newton explained light as consisting of corpuscles. His scientific work "Optics" was not published until 1704.
In 1687, Newton published his three famous laws of motion in the book "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica". The beginnings of this theory lay in the time of the plague, which led to the interruption of his studies and his stay in his parents' house. In this book, also known as "Principia", he also laid down Newton's law of gravitation: Every piece of matter has a so-called heavy mass, the cause of its attraction. - The force of gravity between two bodies is proportional to the product of their masses. - The change in gravity is inversely proportional to the square of their distance. An anecdote tells that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity when an apple fell on his head. Newton is said to have concluded from this that gravity also acts on the moon and that the moon's orbit must consist of two balancing forces - one is the centripetal force, which pulls the bodies to the center of the orbit, and the other is the centrifugal force, which is drawn by the moon Center strives away.
In the three "Principia" books, Newton dealt, in addition to the laws of motion, with planetary orbits, liquids and gases, the refutation of a vortex theory and the dependence of gravity on mass. From 1689 to 1690 Newton was elected MP for Cambridge University. In 1693 he suffered a severe nervous breakdown, which prevented him from further research. He then dealt with alchemy and religious questions. In 1696 he was appointed Mint Warden, supervisor of the royal mint. Three years later he was promoted to mint master, today comparable to finance minister. In 1700 Newton left Cambridge and moved to London. In 1703 he became president of the Royal Society there. In 1705 he became the first scientist to be knighted by the Royal Society. In 1713 and 1726, the three-volume work "Principia" was published for the second and third times, respectively.
Sir Isaac Newton died on March 31, 1727 in London.- Additional Crew
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René Descartes (Latinized: Renatus Cartesius; 31 March 1596 - 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and lay Catholic who invented analytic geometry, linking the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra. He spent a large portion of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. One of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age, Descartes is also widely regarded as one of the founders of modern philosophy.