Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (sometimes von Leibniz) (born 1 July 1646 in Leipzig [OS: 21 June] – died in Hannover 14 November 1716) is a German mathematician and philosopher of Sorbian origin.
Leibniz writes primarily in Latin and French.
He occupies a grand place in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics.
He invents infinitesimal calculus independently of Newton, and his notation has been in general use since then.
He also invents the binary system, the foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures.
In philosophy, he is mostly remembered for optimism, e.g., his conclusion that our universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one God could have made.
He is, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, one of the three great 17th-century rationalists and his work anticipates modern logic and analysis, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or a priori definitions rather than to empirical evidence.
Leibniz also makes major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipates notions that surface much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science.
He also writes on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, philosophy and philology, and even occasional verse.
His contributions to this vast array of subjects are scattered in journals and in tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts.
As of 2010, there is no complete edition of Leibniz's writings.
The collection of manuscript papers of Leibniz at the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek - Niedersächische Landesbibliothek were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2007.
