Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig in 1646, the son of a professor of moral philosophy. At eight he taught himself Latin in his father's library, and at twenty he was a doctor of law. He served all his life as counsellor and librarian to the ducal house of Hanover, and was a universal genius of a rare kind: he invented the calculus independently of Newton, and his notation is still in use; he built a calculating machine that could multiply and divide; he studied the binary system and saw in it a kinship with the trigrams of the Book of Changes; and he promoted the founding of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Deeply interested in China, he edited and published the Novissima Sinica, the Latest News from China.