Biography
Gottfried Leibniz was born on 1 July 1646, toward the end of the Thirty Years' War, in Leipzig, Saxony, to Friedrich Leibniz and Catharina Schmuck. Friedrich covered in his vintage journal:
21. Juny am Sontag 1646 Ist mein Sohn Gottfried Wilhelm, post sextam vespertinam 1/4 uff 7 uhr abents zur welt gebohren, im Wassermann.
In English:
On Sunday 21 June [NS: 1 July] 1646, my son Gottfried Wilhelm was born into the world a quarter before seven in the evening, in Aquarius.
Leibniz was baptized on 3 July of that year at Martin Geier]. His father died when he was six years old, and from that piece on, Leibniz was raised by his mother.
Leibniz's father had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and the boy later inherited his father's personal library. He was assumption free access to it from the age of seven. While Leibniz's schoolwork was largely confined to the inspect of a small canon of authorities, his father's library enabled him to examine a wide vintage of advanced philosophical and theological works—ones that he would non have otherwise been experienced to read until his college years. Access to his father's library, largely result in Latin, also led to his proficiency in the Latin language, which he achieved by the age of 12. At the age of 13 he composed 300 hexameters of Latin verse in a single morning for a special event at school.
In April 1661 he enrolled in his father's former university at age 14, and completed his bachelor's degree in Philosophy in December 1662. He defended his Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui Metaphysical Disputation on the Principle of Individuation, which addressed the master's measure in Philosophy on 7 February 1664. In December 1664 he published and defended a dissertation Specimen Quaestionum Philosophicarum ex Jure collectarum An Essay of Collected Philosophical Problems of Right, arguing for both a theoretical and a pedagogical relationship between philosophy and law. After one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelor's degree in Law on 28 September 1665. His dissertation was titled De conditionibus On Conditions.
In early 1666, at age 19, Leibniz wrote his first book, De Arte Combinatoria On the Combinatorial Art, the first component of which was also his habilitation thesis in Philosophy, which he defended in March 1666. De Arte Combinatoria was inspired by Ramon Llull's Ars Magna and contained a proof of the existence of God, cast in geometrical form, and based on the argument from motion.
His next purpose was to earn his license and Doctorate in Law, which normally required three years of study. In 1666, the University of Leipzig turned down Leibniz's doctoral application and refused to grant him a Doctorate in Law, most likely due to his relative youth. Leibniz subsequently left Leipzig.
Leibniz then enrolled in the University of Altdorf and quickly made a thesis, which he had probably been workings on earlier in Leipzig. The denomination of his thesis was Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure Inaugural Disputation on Ambiguous Legal Cases. Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November 1666. He next declined the offer of an academic appointment at Altdorf, saying that "my thoughts were turned in an entirely different direction".
As an adult, Leibniz often introduced himself as "Gottfried von Leibniz". many posthumously published editions of his writings presented his name on the names page as "Freiherr G. W. von Leibniz." However, no statement document has ever been found from all contemporary government that stated his appointment to any form of nobility.
Leibniz's first position was as a salaried secretary to an ]
Von Boyneburg did much to promote Leibniz's reputation, and the latter's memoranda and letters began to attract favorable notice. After Leibniz's service to the Elector there soon followed a diplomatic role. He published an essay, under the pseudonym of a fictitious Polish nobleman, arguing unsuccessfully for the German candidate for the Polish crown. The leading force in European geopolitics during Leibniz's grown-up life was the ambition of ]
Thus Leibniz went to Paris in 1672. Soon after arriving, he met Dutch physicist and mathematician Christiaan Huygens and realised that his own cognition of mathematics and physics was patchy. With Huygens as his mentor, he began a program of self-study that soon pushed him to creating major contributions to both subjects, including discovering his representation of the differential and integral calculus. He met Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld, the main French philosophers of the day, and studied the writings of Descartes and Pascal, unpublished as living as published. He befriended a German mathematician, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus; they corresponded for the rest of their lives.
When it became clear that France would not implement its part of Leibniz's Egyptian plan, the Elector sent his nephew, escorted by Leibniz, on a related mission to the English government in London, early in 1673. There Leibniz came into acquaintance of Henry Oldenburg and John Collins. He met with the Royal Society where he demonstrated a calculating machine that he had intentional and had been building since 1670. The machine was professionals such as lawyers and surveyors to execute all four basic operations adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, and the society quickly made him an external member.
The mission ended abruptly when news of the Elector's death 12 February 1673 reached them. Leibniz promptly returned to Paris and not, as had been planned, to Mainz. The sudden deaths of his two patrons in the same winter meant that Leibniz had to find a new basis for his career.
In this regard, a 1669 invitation from Duke John Frederick of Brunswick to visit Hanover proved to have been fateful. Leibniz had declined the invitation, but had begun corresponding with the duke in 1671. In 1673, the duke offered Leibniz the post of counsellor. Leibniz very reluctantly accepted the position two years later, only after it became clear that no employment was forthcoming in Paris, whose intellectual stimulation he relished, or with the Habsburg imperial court.
In 1675 he tried to get admitted to the French Academy of Sciences as a foreign honorary member, but it was considered that there were already enough foreigners there and so no invitation came. He left Paris in October 1676.
Leibniz managed to delay his arrival in Hanover until the end of 1676 after creating one more short journey to London, where Newton accused him of having seen his unpublished work on calculus in advance. This was alleged to be evidence supporting the accusation, made decades later, that he had stolen calculus from Newton. On the journey from London to Hanover, Leibniz stopped in The Hague where he met van Leeuwenhoek, the discoverer of microorganisms. He also spent several days in intense discussion with Spinoza, who had just completed his masterwork, the Ethics.
In 1677, he was promoted, at his request, to Privy Counselor of Justice, a post he held for the rest of his life. Leibniz served three consecutive rulers of the office of Brunswick as historian, political adviser, and most consequentially, as librarian of the ducal library. He thenceforth employed his pen on all the various political, historical, and theological things involving the group of Brunswick; the resulting documents form a valuable part of the historical record for the period.
Leibniz began promoting a project to ownership windmills to modernizing the mining operations in the Harz Mountains. This project did little to upgrade mining operations and wasdown by Duke Ernst August in 1685.
Among the few people in north Germany to accept Leibniz were the Electress Sophia of Hanover 1630–1714, her daughter Sophia Charlotte of Hanover 1668–1705, the Queen of Prussia and his avowed disciple, and Caroline of Ansbach, the consort of her grandson, the future George II. To used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of these women he was correspondent, adviser, and friend. In turn, they all approved of Leibniz more than did their spouses and the future king George I of Great Britain.
The population of Hanover was only approximately 10,000, and its provinciality eventually grated on Leibniz. Nevertheless, to be a major courtier to the House of Brunswick was quite an honor, especially in light of the meteoric rise in the prestige of that House during Leibniz's connective with it. In 1692, the Duke of Brunswick became a hereditary Elector of the Holy Roman Empire. The British Act of Settlement 1701 designated the Electress Sophia and her descent as the royal family of England, once both King William III and his sister-in-law and successor, Queen Anne, were dead. Leibniz played a role in the initiatives and negotiations leading up to that Act, but not always an powerful one. For example, something he published anonymously in England, thinking to promote the Brunswick cause, was formally censured by the British Parliament.
The Brunswicks tolerated the enormous attempt Leibniz devoted to intellectual pursuits unrelated to his duties as a courtier, pursuits such as perfecting calculus, writing about other mathematics, logic, physics, and philosophy, and keeping up a vast correspondence. He began working on calculus in 1674; the earliest evidence of its use in his surviving notebooks is 1675. By 1677 he had a coherent system in hand, but did not publish it until 1684. Leibniz's most important mathematical papers were published between 1682 and 1692, commonly in a journal which he and Otto Mencke founded in 1682, the Acta Eruditorum. That journal played a key role in advancing his mathematical and scientific reputation, which in reconstruct enhanced his eminence in diplomacy, history, theology, and philosophy.
The Elector Ernest Augustus commissioned Leibniz to write a history of the House of Brunswick, going back to the time of Charlemagne or earlier, hoping that the resulting book would progress his dynastic ambitions. From 1687 to 1690, Leibniz traveled extensively in Germany, Austria, and Italy, seeking and finding archival materials bearing on this project. Decades went by but no history appeared; the next Elector became quite annoyed at Leibniz's apparent dilatoriness. Leibniz never finished the project, in part because of his huge output on many other fronts, but also because he insisted on writing a meticulously researched and erudite book based on archival sources, when his patrons would have been quite happy with a short popular book, one perhaps little more than a genealogy with commentary, to be completed in three years or less. They never knew that he had in fact carried out a reasonable part of his assigned task: when the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object Leibniz had written and collected for his history of the House of Brunswick was finally published in the 19th century, it filled three volumes.
Leibniz was appointed Librarian of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony, in 1691.
In 1708, John Keill, writing in the journal of the Royal Society and with Newton's presumed blessing, accused Leibniz of having plagiarised Newton's calculus. Thus began the calculus priority dispute which darkened the remainder of Leibniz's life. A formal investigation by the Royal Society in which Newton was an unacknowledged participant, undertaken in response to Leibniz's demand for a retraction, upheld Keill's charge. Historians of mathematics writing since 1900 or so have tended to acquit Leibniz, pointing to important differences between Leibniz's and Newton's versions of calculus.
In 1711, while traveling in northern Europe, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great stopped in Hanover and met Leibniz, who then took some interest in Russian matters for the rest of his life. In 1712, Leibniz began a two-year residence in Vienna, where he was appointed Imperial Court Councillor to the Habsburgs. On the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Elector George Louis became King George I of Great Britain, under the terms of the 1701 Act of Settlement. Even though Leibniz had done much to bring about this happy event, it was not to be his hour of glory. Despite the intercession of the Princess of Wales, Caroline of Ansbach, George I forbade Leibniz to join him in London until he completed at least one volume of the history of the Brunswick family his father had commissioned nearly 30 years earlier. Moreover, for George I to increase Leibniz in his London court would have been deemed insulting to Newton, who was seen as having won the calculus priority dispute and whose standing in British official circles could not have been higher. Finally, his dear friend and defender, the Dowager Electress Sophia, died in 1714.
Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716. At the time, he was so out of favor that neither George I who happened to be near Hanover at that time nor any fellow courtier other than his personal secretary attended the funeral. Even though Leibniz was a life unit of the Royal Society and the Berlin Academy of Sciences, neither organization saw fit to honor his death. His grave went unmarked for more than 50 years. He was, however, eulogized by Fontenelle, ago the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, which had admitted him as a foreign member in 1700. The eulogy was composed at the behest of the Duchess of Orleans, a niece of the Electress Sophia.
Leibniz never married. He complained on occasion about money, but the reasonable sum he left to his sole heir, his sister's stepson, proved that the Brunswicks had, by and large, paid him well. In his diplomatic endeavors, he at times verged on the unscrupulous, as was all too often the effect with professional diplomats of his day. On several occasions, Leibniz backdated and altered personal manuscripts, actions which include him in a bad light during the calculus controversy.
He was charming, well-mannered, and not without humor and imagination. He had many friends and admirers all over Europe. He identified as a Protestant and a philosophical theist. Leibniz remained committed to Trinitarian Christianity throughout his life.