THE
MYTH
Though Jupiter never lay with his adopted daughter Venus, the
magic of her girdle put him in constant temptation, so he decided
to humiliate her by making her fall desperately in love with
a mortal. This was the handsome Anchises, king of the Dardinians,
grandson of Illus. One night when Anchises lay asleep in his
herdsman’s hut on Trojan Mount Ida, Venus visited him
in the guise of a Phyrgian princess, clad in a dazzlingly red
robe, and lay with him while bees buzzed drowsily about them.
When they parted at dawn, she revealed her identity and made
him promise not to tell anyone that she had slept with him.
Anchises was horrified to learn that he had uncovered the nakedness
of a goddess, and begged her to spare his life. She assured
him that he had nothing to fear, and that their son, Aeneus,
would be famous.
THE
MATH
Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
Descartes presented the fundamental concepts of coordinate geometry
in La Geometrie, (1637), which, along with Newton's Principia,
is one of the most influential scientific texts of the 17th
century. By representing a point by a pair of real numbers,
and straight lines and curves by equations, Descartes provided
a link between geometry and algebra.
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