ABSTRACT
Gottfried Leibniz—who died just more than 300 years ago in November 1716—worked on many things, but a theme that recurred throughout his life was the goal of turning human law into an exercise in computation. One gets a reasonable idea of what kinds of constructs one has to deal with just by thinking about parts of speech in English. The Wolfram Language is precise: everything in it is defined to the point where a computer can unambiguously work with it. The 1980s revolution in quantitative finance started when it became clear one could automatically compute distributions of outcomes for simple option contracts. The current thinking for smart contracts tends to be that one has to get humans in the loop to verify the information: that in effect one has to have a jury to decide whether something is true.
