Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was the last true universal scholar of early-modern Europe. Philosophy, mathematics, physics, logic, law, history, theology, linguistics, diplomacy — there is hardly a field he did not enter deeply. A contemporary remark — "rarely has a man of such ability had so little later influence" — reflected only the volume of his unpublished and unfinished work; his real importance was not recognised for more than a century after his death.

Born in 1646 in Leipzig, son of a professor of philosophy, he lost his father at six but had free run of the library, taught himself Latin at twelve, and entered the University of Leipzig at fourteen. He completed a doctorate in law at Altdorf in 1666 at twenty. The same year, his Dissertation on the Combinatorial Art already sketched a vision of formal symbolic logic. From 1668 he served the Elector of Mainz as a diplomatic adviser; in 1672 he was sent to Paris, and his real career began there.

His Paris years (1672-76) were his intellectual peak. He learned mathematics directly from Christiaan Huygens, visited the Royal Society in London, and in 1675 discovered calculus independently of Newton. The notations dx and the integral sign are his — still in use across mathematics today. In the same period he visited Spinoza and was shown the manuscript of the Ethics, but disagreed with him so fundamentally on necessity and contingency that he never embraced it.

From 1676 he served the House of Welf at Hanover as librarian and councillor for forty years until his death in 1716. His seven-year project to improve the Harz silver mines failed; the family history he was commissioned to write was never finished. In 1700, on the invitation of Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, he founded the Berlin Academy of Sciences and became its first president. His final years were soured by the long priority dispute with Newton over calculus, which left him isolated from the British learned world.

His philosophical core is the.