A Gottfried of All Trades: Leibniz and His Trans-Field ExploitsAndrew Nauffts, Benjamin Miller, and Paige PendletonHistory of Physical SciencesApril 21st, 2015
1Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a man of immense intellect only mirrored by his thirst for knowledge. His entire life’s works all stemmed from the same logic he used to explain the way the world itself worked. Even though his works ranged from philosophy to mathematics to politics and beyond, his same personal logic was the birthplace of it all. He saw reality through his belief in everything falling into either absence or existence, zero or one. Everything had a purpose and a logical means of process to Leibniz, it was discovering the process itself using his logic which would make him famous. His works would later be the origins of Binary Code, Calculus, metaphysics, and monadology. Even more things in modern day life can in some way trace their origins to the works of Leibniz, so much so the list would be nearly impossible to create. This case study will discuss the controversy surrounding his most notable achievement, the discovery of the differential calculus, as well as his famous philosophies which mark him as a great philosopher of the ages. All great men must start off aschildren however, and the journey of their maturation often holds clues to how they became who they were. Leibniz was no exception.A Lifetime of Work: A Biography of LeibnizBorn on July 1st, 1646, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz would find himself a Philosopher, Mathematician, a Doctor of Law, and Political Adviser before his death in 1716.Successful in each of these professions, he would often juggle several of them at once giving opportunity to fall directly in to the time’s equivalent of the conceptualized old-boy network.His exploits would range in fields stretching even farther beyond these professions, making Leibniz a Renaissance man of sorts.A man of great intellect, Leibniz pushed himself constantly to refine