In the early seventeenth century, Rená Descartes changed the course of mathematics by creating the coordinate system. Every high school student in the modern world is completely familiar with the x- and y-axes, but the Cartesian coordinate plane was the first development in mathematics that allowed for geometers to use numbers and algebraists to use pictures. Descartes was one of the giants that Isaac Newton referred to in his famous quotation: “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”