Who was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? Facts and quotes from German Polymath celebrated in Google Doodle



[ad_1]

Google Doodle celebrates the 372nd birthday of the German philosopher, mathematician and philologist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibnitz was born on July 1, 1646 in Leipzig, Germany, towards the end of the devastating 30-year war

. His revolutionary work in mathematics helped pave the way for the invention of smartphones and computers, as you probably read this article.

 GettyImages- 51244188 Circa 1701, engraving by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646 – 1716) German mathematician, philosopher and historian. Getty Images

The greatest accomplishment of Leibniz is considered to be his development of differential calculus, used to calculate rates of change, and integral calculus, used for calculate the area and volume. Isaac Newton was working on similar ideas at the same time, and since both of them were members of the Royal Society of London, it is likely that they would have known about each other's work.

Mathematicians prefer Leibnitz's notation as the foundation of calculation, while Newton has fallen out of favor. Leibnitz has also developed the binary numbering system, the foundation of today's digital computers.

He is also one of the key figures of modern philosophy, whose optimistic rationalist system, as expounded in works such as Monadology, was stolen by the world. French author Voltaire in his satire Candide.

Leibniz in quotation marks

"There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of the fact The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible, truths of fact are contingent and their opposites are possible. " Monadology.

"And as any current state of a single substance is naturally a consequence" Monadology

"However God created the world, it would have always been regular and in a certain general order, however, chose the most perfect, that is to say the one that is at once the simplest in the hypothesis and the richest in the phenomena ", Discourse on Metaphysics.

[ad_2]
Source link