Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Quiz: Friedrich Leibniz Flashcards

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath who made significant contributions to mathematics, philosophy, science, and diplomacy. He wrote works on various subjects such as philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, history, and philology. Leibniz independently developed the main ideas of differential and integral calculus, and his notation is considered more conventional and precise than Isaac Newton's. He also contributed to the field of mechanical calculators, refined the binary number system, and invented the Leibniz wheel. Leibniz's philosophy assimilates elements of the scholastic tradition, and he is known for his optimism, which states that our world is the best possible world that God could have created. He was a leading representative of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. Leibniz's contributions to various subjects were scattered in learned journals, letters, and unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily Latin, French, and German. Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Saxony, to Friedrich Leibniz and Catharina Schmuck. His father was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and the boy inherited his father's personal library. At 13, Leibniz composed 300 hexameters of Latin verse in a single morning for a special event at school. At 14, he enrolled in his father's former university and completed his bachelor's degree in Philosophy at 16. Leibniz earned his master's degree in Philosophy at 17 and his bachelor's degree in Law at 19. He wrote his first book, De Arte Combinatoria, at 19, which contained a proof of the existence of God based on the argument from motion. Leibniz's first position was as a salaried secretary to an alchemical society in Nuremberg, and he soon met Johann Christian von Boyneburg, who hired him as an assistant. After von Boyneburg's death, Leibniz found a new basis for his career by accepting the position of counsellor in Hanover. He promoted a project to use windmills to improve the mining operations in the Harz Mountains, which did little to improve mining operations and was shut down by Duke Ernst August in 1685. Leibniz served three consecutive rulers of the House of Brunswick as historian, political adviser, and librarian of the ducal library. The British Act of Settlement 1701 designated the Electress Sophia and her descent as the royal family of England, once King William III and Queen Anne were dead, and Leibniz played a role in the initiatives and negotiations leading up to that Act.Life and Work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Leibniz pursued many interests outside of his duties as a courtier, including mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology.
He began working on calculus in 1674 and had a coherent system in hand by 1677, but did not publish it until 1684.
Leibniz was commissioned to write a history of the House of Brunswick by the Elector Ernest Augustus in 1687, but the project was never finished.
In 1691, Leibniz was appointed Librarian of the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Lower Saxony.
The calculus priority dispute began in 1708 when John Keill accused Leibniz of plagiarizing Newton's calculus. A formal investigation by the Royal Society upheld Keill's charge.
Leibniz died in Hanover in 1716, largely out of favor with his contemporaries.
Leibniz never married and complained about money on occasion, but left a fair sum to his sole heir.
Leibniz was influenced by Descartes, Huygens, Newton, and Boyle but viewed their work through a lens heavily tinted by scholastic notions.
Leibniz's philosophical writings consist mainly of a multitude of short pieces.
His best-known contribution to metaphysics is his theory of monads, which he proposed in Monadologie.
Leibniz's proof of God can be summarized in the Théodicée, which attempts to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds.
Leibniz believed that reason and faith must be entirely reconciled, and any tenet of faith which could not be defended by reason must be rejected.Summary Title: The Philosophy, Mathematics, and Contributions of Gottfried Leibniz
Leibniz believed that God is a perfect being incapable of acting imperfectly, and the decisions God makes are perfect.
To truly love God, one must be content with all that comes to them according to His will.
Leibniz believed in a substance that is a necessary being bearing the reason for its existence within itself.
He believed that human reasoning could be reduced to calculations and that symbols were important for human understanding.
Leibniz proposed the creation of a universal characteristic built on an alphabet of human thought in which each fundamental concept would be represented by a unique "real" character.
Leibniz is noted as one of the most important logicians between Aristotle and Gottlob Frege.
He invented one of the earliest mechanical calculators and is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the discovery of calculus.
Leibniz exploited infinitesimals in developing calculus, manipulating them in ways suggesting that they had paradoxical algebraic properties.
He was engaged in a dispute with John Keill, Newton, and others over whether he had invented calculus independently of Newton.
Leibniz was the first to use the term analysis situs, later used in the 19th century to refer to what is now known as topology.
Leibniz is known for his work in linear systems and the theory of determinants, and he calculated the purchase price of life annuities and the liquidation of a state's debt.
Leibniz wrote that circles can most simply be expressed by the aggregate of fractions alternately added and subtracted.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath who made significant contributions to a wide range of fields including mathematics, physics, psychology, social science, technology, and computation. He is known for his concept of self-similarity and improving Euclid's axiom. Leibniz disagreed with Descartes and Newton on the concept of relative space and developed a new theory of motion based on kinetic and potential energy. He also anticipated the idea of space, time, and motion being relative, not absolute, which was later proven by Einstein. Leibniz's vis viva was mv2, twice the modern kinetic energy, and he believed that total energy would be conserved in certain mechanical systems. He was a preformationist in embryology, proposed that organisms are the outcome of a combination of an infinite number of possible microstructures and of their powers, and had a transformist intuition in the life sciences and paleontology. Leibniz was a direct influence on Ernst Platner, who is credited with originally coining the term Unbewußtseyn (unconscious). He advocated establishing a medical administrative authority, with powers over epidemiology and veterinary medicine, and proposed tax reforms and a national insurance program in economic policy. Leibniz was a serious inventor, engineer, and applied scientist, with great respect for practical life, and his design of wind-driven propellers and water pumps, mining machines to extract ore, hydraulic presses, lamps, submarines, clocks, etc., had a significant impact. He documented the binary numeral system (base 2), which he revisited throughout his career and may have been the first computer scientist and information theorist. Leibniz also worked as a librarian in the Hanoverian court of Johann Friedrich, Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg, and was one of the founders of library science, improving the catalog and creating an alphabetical author catalog.