
The flight of the fly… Published on February 22, 2010
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“On the early 17th century, in the city of La Haye en Touraine, France, lived a sickly child named René Descartes.
To shore up his health, he was allowed to sleep until 11 o’clock every morning, a habit he maintained throughout his adult life.
During one of these mornings abed, young Descartes watched a fly flit across the ceiling. He realized he could describe the fly’s movements and its location by measuring its distance from two perpendicular walls.
A formalized version of this fly-tracking technique became the Cartesian coordinate system of perpendicular lines and planes, the ubiquitous (x,y) coordinate system that we all well know.”
(read somewhere, some years ago)
