ABSTRACT
Situated southeast of the German city of Hanover, the ore-rich veins of the Harz mountain region had been mined since the middle of the tenth century. During the years 1680–1685, the Harz mountain mining managers were in frequent conflict with a most unlikely miner. Some 70 years earlier, Cervantes had written of the misadventures of a melancholy Spaniard with windmills. Unlike Don Quixote, Leibniz was incurably optimistic. But Leibniz's involvement with the Harz Mountain mining project ultimately proved to be a fiasco. In his optimism, he had not foreseen the natural hostility of the expert mining engineers towards a novice proposing to teach them their trade. Leibniz had a vision of amazing scope and grandeur. The notation he had developed for the differential and integral calculus, the notation still used today, made it easy to do complicated calculations with little thought. The Thirty Years War had left France as the "superpower" on the European continent.
