Van Schooten met Descartes in 1632 and read his Géométrie (an appendix to his Discours de la méthode) while it was still unpublished.

Finding it hard to understand, he went to France to study the works of other important mathematicians of his time, such as François Viète and Pierre de Fermat.

The pendant marriage portraits of him and his wife Margrieta Wijnants were painted by Rembrandt and are kept in the National Gallery of Art:[1] Van Schooten's 1649 Latin translation of and commentary on Descartes' Géométrie was valuable in that it made the work comprehensible to the broader mathematical community, and thus was responsible for the spread of analytic geometry to the world.

Van Schooten was one of the first to suggest, in exercises published in 1657, that these ideas be extended to three-dimensional space.

Van Schooten's efforts also made Leiden the centre of the mathematical community for a short period in the middle of the seventeenth century.