The idea of graphing with coordinate axes dates all the way back to Apollonius in the second century B.C. Rene Descartes, who lived in the 1600s, gets the credit for coming up with the two-axis system we use today. The story goes that he lay in bed and watched flies crawling over tiles on the ceiling. He realized that he could describe a fly's position using the intersecting lines of the tiles. The system is often called the "Cartesian coordinate system" in his honor.
