16 July

Cartesian coordinates. Named after Descartes, although Fermat developed the idea separately too, and there were others before them. One of those things you learn in school and maybe wonder why. For me, this is how we tend to think about space, in everything we do, as a collection of points. That assumption has repercussions everywhere in our lives. For example, it makes us struggle to understand relationships, between anything, because we see relationships as something happening between independent points in space, whether that’s objects or people. But there are no independent points in space. ‘Space’ itself in the way we usually understand it is an idea invented by Cartesian coordinates. Another example I think of how what we learn in maths (like infinity) has really profound links to some of our most basic experiences.