Gottfried Leibniz was a mathematician, a philosopher, and an advisor to kings, that was born near the end of the thirty years war. He admired minds such as Aristotle’s and Socrates, and lived his life for the sophistication and the modernization of mathematics and science. He was an influential politician of his time, but more importantly he is known for his inventions of integral and differential calculus. Even though history tells a different story of calculus’s invention we are going to dive into the life and inventions of Gottfried Leibniz.
He was born in Germany, which lay in ruins because of the thirty years war, by prominent` Lutheran parents. Which was actually extremely unique because in that time because the dominant religion was Catholicism, and most members of the Lutheran church were considered outcasts. Since his town and most of Germany was in ruins, he was mostly self-taught by his father, but most likely from his father’s extensive library. He decided in the spring of 1661 to enroll in the prestigious university of Liebzig in modern day Germany. This university was part of the same university that housed Galileo and other scientific minds like Francis Bacon. At age 20 he applied for a doctor’s degree in law and was refused because of his young age. After the denial he fled his hometown, and would never return for the rest of his life. He ended up in the town of Altdolf and attended a university in that town and was automatically given his doctorates for his dissertation of Des Casibus Perplexis or in English On Perplexing Cases. After a few fruitless jobs he meant young statesmen called Johann Christian of Boyenburg. During his employment under Johann Christian he worked on many pieces and works of literature that would reunite the Catholic Church, which was slightly ironic because he was born of Lutheran parents. After the completion of this work Johann Christian sent him to Paris, but shortly after the young statesman was killed and once again Liebniz was out of a job. But instead of rushing to find another job he used this time to study whatever he wanted. However since he was unemployed he needed a way to come up with some financial stability, so he could become free to study mathematics and other physical sciences. So after little trial and error he created a calculating machine and presented it to the royal family in London. He then had that financial stability he was seeking and was free to think and study.
Nobody knows how, but in later parts of 1675 Liebniz is said to have invented calculus, and had perfected his inventions and ideas in regards to integral and differential equations. With his creations he became obsessed with the idea of there is no such thing as time and space. He started to make predictions of phenomena’s based on his study of motions. He started to predict that motion was the fact of an invisible movement that could not only be explained in the idea of a force. To simply state what he was trying to say is that he was proposing the idea of gravity or more specifically a gravitational pull. With these conclusions stated with no factual information behind them he became discredited in his ideas of physics but the public also questioned his works in mathematics.
In 1676 he took a job working for a duke in his native country of Germany where he became a very well-known philosopher. However it was a unique circumstance, he was the only well-known philosopher that had to still work for a living. Royalty as a result used his expertise and was actually very well known throughout all of Germany for a jack-of-all-trades. Throughout the next five years however he felt underutilized so he started expanding his knowledge to the machine word. He started studying windmills and hydraulic pressures, but he also experimented with phosphorous and its reactions. In 1685 however while working on windmills he came up with the idea of a binary system. The same system is still used on modern computers and other devices that use basic coding for data. Throughout the next couple years he jumped between algebra and differential equations.
After this discovery and publication of his book Nova Methodus pro Maximus et Minimus, or New Method for the Greatest and the Least, he really did not have any more mathematical discoveries for the rest of his life. He really focused more on theories of god and man and how we live together. He stated that the relations of God and his perspective and logic related to man and his logic. There was a change in Leibniz thinking, he was more influenced by the mysticism of God than the physical sciences of mathematics and physics. He even became a historian towards the end of his life.
Gottfried Leibniz was a man of many things whether it was inventing modern marvels or organizing theories of mathematics, he was a visionary but his history is overshadowed by Sir Isaac Newton.
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