Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz 1 July
1646 – 14 November 1716) was a German philosopher, polymath and
mathematician who wrote primarily in Latin and French.
The modern binary number system
was fully documented by Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century in his article
Explication de l'Arithmétique Binaire. Leibniz's system used 0 and 1, like the
modern binary numeral system. As a Sinophile, Leibniz was aware of the I Ching
and noted with fascination how its hexagrams correspond to the binary numbers
from 0 to 111111, and concluded that this mapping was evidence of major Chinese
accomplishments in the sort of philosophical mathematics he admired
He occupies a grand place in
both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He invented
infinitesimal calculus independently of Newton,
and his notation has been in general use
since then. He also invented the binary system, foundation of virtually
all modern computer architectures. In philosophy, he is mostly 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 greatest 17th-century rationalists and
anticipates modern logic and analysis, but his philosophy also looks back to
the scholastic tradition, in which logic was an important part. 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, philosophy and philology, 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journals and in tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts.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
2009, there is no complete edition of Leibniz's writings.
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