Apollonius used what basically amounts to Descartes’s coordinate method in the 1st century for studying conic sections, and European mathematicians of the 16th–

Apollonius used what basically amounts to Descartes’s coordinate method in the 1st century for studying conic sections, and European mathematicians of the 16th–17th centuries were all quite familiar with his work. But the formulation was somewhat cumbersome and context-specific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_of_Perga#The_coordinate_system_of_Apollonius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonius_of_Perga#The_coordi... The world also had a long cartographic tradition based on coordinates. Moreover, Descartes’s book only used one coordinate axis at a time, only used positive numbers, and used it as a tool for setting up geometry problems to be solved algebraically, not as a general tool for what we now think of as graphing functions/equations. The way we think of the “Cartesian plane” is not the way Descartes thought about it. The history of these conceptual developments is richer and more complicated than popularly imagined today.