The German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz occupies a grand place in the history of philosophy. Like many great thinkers before and after him, Leibniz was a child prodigy and a contributor in many different fields of endeavour.
But, between his work on philosophy and logic and his day job as a politician and representative of the royal house of Hanover, Leibniz still found time to work on mathematics. He was perhaps the first to explicitly employ the mathematical notion of a function to denote geometric concepts derived from a curve, and he developed a system of infinitesimal calculus, independently of his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton. He also revived the ancient method of solving equations using matrices, invented a practical calculating machine and pioneered the use of the binary system.
Unlike Newton, however, he was more than happy to publish his work, and so Europe first heard about calculus from Leibniz in 1684, and not from Newton (who published nothing on the subject until 1693). When the Royal Society was asked to adjudicate between the rival claims of the two men over the development of the theory of calculus, they gave credit for the first discovery to Newton, and credit for the first publication to Leibniz.
You can watch a video Newton vs. Leibniz - The Controversy Over the Discovery of the Calculus to know some facts:
Leibniz is also often considered the most important logician between Aristotle in Ancient Greece and George Boole and Augustus De Morgan in the19th Century. Even though he actually published nothing on formal logic in his lifetime, he enunciated in his working drafts the principal properties of what we now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion and the empty set.
But, between his work on philosophy and logic and his day job as a politician and representative of the royal house of Hanover, Leibniz still found time to work on mathematics. He was perhaps the first to explicitly employ the mathematical notion of a function to denote geometric concepts derived from a curve, and he developed a system of infinitesimal calculus, independently of his contemporary Sir Isaac Newton. He also revived the ancient method of solving equations using matrices, invented a practical calculating machine and pioneered the use of the binary system.
Unlike Newton, however, he was more than happy to publish his work, and so Europe first heard about calculus from Leibniz in 1684, and not from Newton (who published nothing on the subject until 1693). When the Royal Society was asked to adjudicate between the rival claims of the two men over the development of the theory of calculus, they gave credit for the first discovery to Newton, and credit for the first publication to Leibniz.
You can watch a video Newton vs. Leibniz - The Controversy Over the Discovery of the Calculus to know some facts:
Leibniz is also often considered the most important logician between Aristotle in Ancient Greece and George Boole and Augustus De Morgan in the19th Century. Even though he actually published nothing on formal logic in his lifetime, he enunciated in his working drafts the principal properties of what we now call conjunction, disjunction, negation, identity, set inclusion and the empty set.
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