Inspirational Quotes by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (German Philosopher, Mathematician)

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician, and political leader. He is important not only as a metaphysician and a logician—he laid the foundation of eighteenth-century rationalism,—but also for his independent formulation of infinitesimal calculus.

One of the primary polymath intellects of the 17th century, Leibniz was one of the leading forces in the German Enlightenment. He made original contributions to optics, mechanics, statistics, and probability theory. He conceived the idea of calculating machines, wrote on history, law, and political philosophy.

Born in Leipzig, Leibniz studied law. In 1667, he wrote an essay on legal education that got him a position at the court of the Elector of Mainz. He engaged in the cause of reconciliation between Protestants and Roman Catholics and was invited to oversee the Vatican Library.

In Théodicée (1710; Essays on Theodicy) and Monadologie (1714; The Monadology,) Leibniz offered a rationalist form of metaphysics. He argued that, out of necessity, a perfect Being created the best of all possible worlds where everything—even evil—is divinely motivated. The French Enlightenment writer Voltaire satirized this belief, especially in his Candide, ou l’Optimisme.

A pioneer of modern symbolic logic, Leibniz made the critical distinction between necessary (or “logical”) truths and contingent (or “factual”) truths and proposed a universal logical language that would eliminate ambiguity. This influenced the contributions of nineteenth-century mathematicians Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Leibniz also conceived a method of infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton. Newton is believed to have formulated differential calculus ten years before Leibniz, but Leibniz was the first to publish his exposition on the fundamental theorem of calculus (1684.)

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