Gottfried Leibniz biography
Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, polymath, linguist, logician, the founder and the first president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
Gottfried Leibniz was born in 1646 in Leipzig (eastern Germany). His father died in when the boy was six years old, leaving his personal library, which became an important place for a future philosopher right at the age of seven. In 1661, Leibniz entered the University of Leipzig, where in 1663 he received a bachelor's degree in Philosophy, with a dissertation Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation, from which began his later theory of monads. On the Combinatorial Art (1666) was his first book and a habilitation thesis in Philosophy.
Despite his remarkable reputation and recognition of his works at that time, Leibniz was denied the degree of a Doctor in Law in Leipzig, so he immediately went to Altdorf, where in February 1667 he received this degree for his dissertation Inaugural Disputation on Ambiguous Legal Cases. From 1667 to 1672 he was an assistant to the Elector of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn. His service later grew into a diplomatic role and made him an opportunity to travel to Paris and London. While in Paris, Leibniz began a study on differential and integral calculus. Leibniz gave extraordinary attention to the questions of convenient scientific notation, and in manuscripts of 11 November 1675, he first used the now well-known integral sign.
In 1676, Leibniz was promoted to Privy Counselor of Justice, a post that he held for the rest of his life. Here in Hanover, he served as an advisor, historian, diplomat and librarian of the House of Brunswick. Leibnitz continued mathematical research, discovered the Newton-Leibniz theorem. Already in 1676, Leibnitz wrote in the letters the foundations of mathematical analysis. The volume of his correspondence is enormous; it has reached a truly astronomical number - about 15,000 letters. In 1682 Leibniz founded the scientific journal "Acta Eruditorum," which played a significant role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in Europe. Leibniz himself died in Hanover, Germany, on 14 November 1716, and his funeral was shunned by the court of George I, the Royal Society and the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
Gottfried Leibniz created combinatorics as a science, made a significant contribution to logic and philosophy. Through coding, he tried to create a universal digital descriptive platform for all sciences - a prototype of modern formal systems. He created the first mechanical counting machine capable of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Regardless of Newton, he created differential and integral calculus and laid the foundations for the binary number system.
Leibnitz is also the creator of the philosophical system, called monadology. He developed a theory of analysis and synthesis, for the first time formulated the principle of sufficient reason. Gottfried Leibniz's theory of optimism gained wide popularity. The treatise Théodicée (1710) is an attempt to prove that, despite the unconditional presence in the world of imperfection and moral evil, the world created by God is nevertheless the best of all possible.
Gottfried Leibniz quotes
To love is to be delighted by the happiness of someone, or to experience pleasure upon the happiness of another. I define this as true love.
Everything that is possible demands to exist.
Every substance is as a world apart, independent of everything else except God.
To love is to find pleasure in the happiness of others.
I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.
God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts.
There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible.
A great doctor kills more people than a great general.