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

As an architect, Desargues planned several private and public buildings in Paris and Lyon.

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).