Conclusion

We've seen that many different people contributed to the idea of coordinate graphing. The basic idea of using reference lines to study curves was known as long ago as the ancient Greeks. In the Middle Ages, Nicole Oresme drew bar graphs of time and velocity. But to graph functions the way we do today, ideas from algebra and geometry had to be combined. This didn't happen until the 1600s, and involved many contributors, including Descartes, Fermat, Leibniz, and Newton.

On its own, Descartes' fly was not enough.