ABSTRACT
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz) was educated in law and philosophy; serving as factotum to two major German noble houses, he played a major role in European politics and diplomacy (Wikipedia page on Leibniz, March 2008). He occupies an equally large place in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He discovered calculus independently of Newton, and his notation is the one in general use since then. He also discovered the binary system, the foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures. In philosophy, he is most remembered for optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one God could have made. He was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, one of the three great seventeenth-century rationalists. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, linguistics, and information science. He also wrote on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology, and even occasional verse.
