Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

I was born at Leipzig in 1646. As a boy I wandered my father's books and taught myself Latin from their spines. At twenty I printed my Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria, then took a doctorate in law at Altdorf and declined a professorship. I entered the service of Baron von Boineburg and the Elector of Mainz, where I penned a Consilium Aegyptiacum to divert Louis XIV from the Rhine by an expedition to Egypt.

Paris made me a mathematician. Under Huygens I learned to measure the swift and the small; in London (1673) I showed my stepped Reckoner to the Royal Society and was elected a Fellow. From these years came the signs ∫ and d, and the methods that I first printed in Acta Eruditorum (1684). I trusted that clear symbols would make reasoning as tractable as numbers.

In Hanover I served as librarian and historiographer, traveling through archives to trace the lineage of the Guelphs. I labored for the reunion of churches, drafted projects of law and mining, and argued that vis viva—living force—was conserved. I set out binary arithmetic (1703) and, in letters with missionaries from China, saw in their hexagrams the play of one and nothing. Always I sought a characteristica universalis, a language fit to calculate thought.

My philosophy bears names others gave it: sufficient reason, pre‑established harmony, monads. In the Theodicy I defended God's justice; in later notes I set down the Monadology (1714). I wished for concord, yet the dispute with Newton's partisans about priority in the calculus shadowed my last years. When I died in 1716, my king did not attend my funeral. Still, I kept faith that order lies beneath seeming discord.