Agency (sociology) experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position they are born into. Disagreement on the extent of one's agency often causes conflict between parties, e.g. parents and children. The concept of agency has existed since the Enlightenment. René Descartes' phrase Cogito ergo sum stated that anyone who could think is an agent , and any agent capable of knowing that it can think was a subject. Immanuel Kant expanded on this theory by stating that the only way to truly become self-aware is
Descartes number Descartes number In number theory, a Descartes number is an odd number which would have been an odd perfect number, if one of its composite factors were prime. They are named after René Descartes who observed that the number would be an odd perfect number if only were a prime number, since the sum-of-divisors function for would satisfy, if 22021 were prime, where we ignore the fact that reveals that 22021 is composite. A Descartes number is defined as an odd number where and are coprime and , whence is taken as a 'spoof' prime. The example given is the