Born in Lyon, Desargues came from a family devoted to service to the French crown.

Prior to that, he had worked as a tutor and may have served as an engineer and technical consultant in the entourage of Richelieu.

His research on perspective and geometrical projections can be seen as a culmination of centuries of scientific inquiry across the classical epoch in optics that stretched from al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) to Johannes Kepler, and going beyond a mere synthesis of these traditions with Renaissance perspective theories and practices.

[5] One notable work, often cited by others in mathematics, is "Rough draft for an essay on the results of taking plane sections of a cone" (1639).

The most common theory about what this stands for is Des Argues, Lyonnais, Géometre (proposed by Henri Brocard).