Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

About this figure

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig in 1646, the son of a professor of moral philosophy, and showed prodigious intellectual range from an early age, teaching himself Latin as a child and entering the University of Leipzig at fifteen. He earned a doctorate in law and spent most of his career not in a university post but in the service of noble patrons, most notably the House of Hanover, for whom he worked for decades as a librarian, historian, and diplomatic advisor, a position that gave him time and resources to pursue an extraordinary range of independent inquiry in mathematics, logic, physics, and philosophy.

In mathematics, Leibniz developed the differential and integral calculus independently of, and at roughly the same time as, Isaac Newton, introducing much of the notation, including the integral sign and the "d" for differentials, still used today; a bitter priority dispute broke out between his supporters and Newton's in the early eighteenth century over which of them deserved credit, a controversy that damaged relations between British and Continental mathematicians for a generation. In philosophy, his late work the Monadology, written in 1714, presents reality as composed of an infinite number of simple, indivisible, non-physical units he called monads, each reflecting the entire universe from its own perspective and pre-established by God to exist in harmony with all others without any direct causal interaction between them.

His earlier Theodicy, published in 1710, took up the problem of reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with a benevolent and omnipotent God, arguing that the actual world, despite its imperfections, is the best of all possible worlds that God could have created, since any alternative arrangement would necessarily contain a greater balance of evil; the phrase became famous decades later largely through Voltaire's satirical rejection of it in Candide. Leibniz also worked on early mechanical calculating machines and proposed ideas anticipating later developments in formal logic and binary arithmetic. He died in Hanover in 1716, largely out of favor with his patrons by the end of his life.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.