Planting Rainbows

You may have heard of René Descartes, the philosopher who pondered if all the world could be an intricate simulation to feed our mind.

He also developed our scheme of using orthogonal axes to describe planar and spatial geometry, coined the Cartesian Coordinate System.

Centuries before we programmed our electronic computers to render our three dimensional world, René invented the concept of "ray tracing." Using his ray tracing techniques today, we can simulate some of the most esoteric of lighting phenomena found in nature.

He found, with crisp mathematical and geometrical drawings and figures, in the 17th Century, exactly why we see rainbows.

But that doesn't make them any less magical.