OH YOU KNEW IT WAS COMING.

LEIBNIZ DAY!

367 years ago today, the coolest polymath to ever exist was born.

I was hoping to be through Antognazza’s biography of him by today so I could extoll every inch of his beautiful mind that is covered in the 664-page bio, but alas, calc III happened (not that I’m complaining) and so my reading time was severely hindered. So I’m about halfway through as of writing this blog (I think he’s in his 40s at this point in the bio).

And with each page I’m like, “holy monads, Batman, it is not possible to like this man any more than I already do.”
And then I read the next page and I like him even more.

It’s hard for me to express exactly why I like Leibniz so much. As I mentioned in a past blog, as soon as I started reading his work and reading about him in general I felt this weird connection with him. Like we were supposed to know each other but the universe was like “NOPE!” and threw us into the mix a couple centuries apart.

(Don’t judge me, I’m really trying to not sound creepy. Am I failing miserably?)

And as I’ve mentioned in other blogs, it really seems like he was just a good guy. He wasn’t a buttface to those who disagreed with his philosophy or ideas about the natural world. He was accused like five separate times of stealing others’ ideas (which he never did) but never totally flipped out and started smothering people with his wig. According to the reports of his contemporaries, he was very kind, congenial, and graceful in social settings. The ladies seemed to dig him (SMART LADIES!). AND he was about as naturally intellectually curious as a person could be.

Seriously. A year after his father’s death when Leibniz was six, he inherited his library and immediately worked to teach himself Greek and Latin so that he could read the works of the ancient philosophers (his father taught moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig). He received his law degree when he was like 19 and for his doctoral dissertation he wrote some work on permutations/combinations that was fairly groundbreaking. And this was before he even started to seriously get into the field of mathematics.

Yup, the guy who invented calculus didn’t really start into math until his twenties. He was interested in law and philosophy originally, but as he continued to refine his ideas he began to move into math. As he began his travels around Europe after finishing his education, it became clear to him that his mathematical knowledge was lacking. So he was like, “oh crap, better catch up!” and pretty much taught himself everything without anyone’s help

Actually, when I was reading about his early life in the bio, it was this fact that he was so self-taught that was really the cause behind most of the accusations of plagiarism he faced. He didn’t start out in math, as I said, so he had to catch himself up. Along the way, he started making advancements and discoveries that, to him, were new and unique, and thus he eagerly published them. But unbeknownst to him, several of these major discoveries were things that had actually been discovered and published not too long before. So some people (*cough*Hooke*cough*) were like “hey, you totally got that from [insert mathematician here]! THIEF!” even though he had come up with it on his own.

Really. That happened to him like three times even before the whole calculus thing.

And did you know he was the one who came up with what is today known as Cramer’s Rule? Truth! But like a lot of the stuff he developed, it was so advanced for his time that it just kind of sat in his notes and wasn’t used for a long time.

(Like his binary!)

But I think the one thing that I really, really like about him is the fact that he was always looking for connections between everything. He was convinced that even the most isolated bits of the universe and of human knowledge were connected to everything else and that a system could be developed with which we could express these connections and better understand them. In everything he did, he always seemed to be driving towards defining this system and better describing the connectivity of the universe.

And that’s just cool.

NNNNNNNNNNNNF I JUST LOVE HIM, OKAY?

(I live in a fantasy world where Leibniz and I are married and he does calculus and I do statistics and we do each other and life is perfect.)

Um…anyway.

Expect another Leibniz-heavy blog when I finish the whole bio, ‘cause it’s going to happen whether you like it or not.

Until next year!

Happy birthday, Gottfried! <3