Calculus gottfried leibniz biography

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God, in His infinite wisdom, chose the best possible arrangement of reality.

Calculus and the Dispute with Newton

One of Leibniz’s most famous achievements outside philosophy was his independent development of calculus.

Because of the ability of binary to be represented by the two phases “on” and “off”, it would later become the foundation of virtually all modern computer systems, and Leibniz’s documentation was essential in the development process.

Leibniz is also often considered the most important logician between Aristotle in Ancient Greece and George Boole and Augustus De Morgan in the 19th Century.

Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.”

– Monadology

“no fact can ever be true or existent, no statement correct, unless there is a sufficient reason why things are as they are and not otherwise – even if in most cases we can’t know what the reason is.”

– Monadology

“necessary truths are innate, are proved by what lies within, and can’t be established by experience in the way truths of fact can.”

– New Essays on Human Understanding

“And this design of the best being of such a nature that the good must be enhanced therein, as light is enhanced by shade, by some evil which is incomparably less than this good, God could not have excluded this evil, nor introduced certain goods that were excluded from this plan, without wronging his supreme perfection.

Leibniz strongly disagreed, defending the rationalist position that some knowledge must be innate and present in the mind prior to experience.

Leibniz’s response to Locke came in New Essays on Human Understanding (1704), a book structured as a direct critique of Locke’s work. Despite his intellectual achievements, Leibniz was largely ignored by his contemporaries while alive and died in relative obscurity in 1716.

Key Ideas

Monadology

One of Leibniz’s most famous contributions to philosophy is his Monadology (1714), in which he presents a radically unique vision of reality.

By autumn 1676 Leibniz discovered the familiar \(d(x^n)=nx^{n-1}dx\) for both integral and fractional \(n.\)

Leibniz began publishing his calculus results during the 1680s. His work in logic anticipated the formal logic of Frege, Russell, and Gödel, while his vision of a universal symbolic system foreshadowed modern computer science.

Key Works and Further Reading

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