An exciting and vibrant journey into the early Enlightenment and the mind of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by a renowned authority and expert on one of the greatest thinkers of his time and the last universal genius.
Michael Kempe elegantly recounts seven days in Leibniz's overflowing life. On each of these days, Leibniz's life and work take a new turn. In 1675, we meet him in Paris, working in bed in the morning, surrounded by a mountain of notes. This is the very day that he first puts "∫" on paper: the integral symbol. This one s-shaped line would become a trailblazing sign and mark a groundbreaking moment in the history of mathematics – and the start of a lifelong dispute between Leibniz and Isaac Newton and his followers. But the invention of calculus wasn’t even Leibniz’s greatest achievement – that was the design for a machine able to perform calculations using only the numbers 0 and 1, laying the foundations for binary code and the computer.
There is Leibniz the thinker, and then there is Leibniz the social butterfly: he was a man of the court, an excellent and clever networker, a prolific writer of letters. In 1696, we accompany him to Hanover, where he converses at court with the Electress Sophie about the consolations of philosophy.
It is both as a scientist and a philosopher that Leibniz still has much to say to us today: God may have created the best of all possible worlds, as he suggests in his famous "Theodicy" but humankind must continue to improve it through its actions. Voltaire may have skewered what he thought was Leibniz’s naïve optimism in his famous “Candide”, but his argument that in order for science and ideas to thrive, freedom of thought is key, is as true today as it was during his day; underneath his wig and frock coat, Leibniz turns out to be an utterly modern figure.
Leibniz was a jack-of-all-trades, philosopher, inventor, mathematician, traveler and networker. In this unique biography, we get to know his world, his life, his way of thinking and working.
"Michael Kempe has written the Leibniz biography for our time. It is difficult to do justice to this rich mind. But Kempe succeeds in doing exactly this: seven days capture an entire life, seven key moments form a great and contradictory picture." – Daniel Kehlmann
