Gottfried Leibniz
Gottfried Leibniz, (1646-1716). German philosopher and mathematician. Having qualified as a lawyer in 1666, he entered the court of the elector of Mainz and worked on political missions. A meeting with Christian Huygens in Paris rekindled his interest in mathematics; the invention of a calculating machine and a new form of calculus are amongst his achievements in this field. He entered the service of the duke of Brunswick-Luneburg in 1676, and in 1685 he became the official historian of the House of Brunswick. His philosophical works include Theodicy (1710) and Monadology (1714), in which he puts forward his optimistic philosophy that this is the best of all possible worlds.
