Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Portrait: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, memorial by Ernst Julius Hähnel, situated on the grounds of Leipzig University, 1883
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1646-1716

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Philosopher, natural scientist and inventor

When I was growing up I had so many ideas that the day wasn’t long enough to write them all down.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz about himself

Lawyer’s son Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz already attended Leipzig University at the age of 14 and, while strolling in Rosenthal, he pondered the great philosophical concepts which had dominated western thinking since the Antique. Nowadays he is seen as the German universal thinker who pushed forward developments in many fields and made a name for himself as a mathematician, physicist, philosopher, librarian, historian and legal expert.

With Isaac Newton as his rival in differential equations and calculus, Leibniz strived to create a logical language of symbols in order to describe the entire world, was the first to deal in detail with the dual system of zero and one, and he constructed a calculating machine.