[German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz collected fossils and conducted geological research, which eventually resulted in an innovative essay on the history of the earth. He had also begun another project, one that proved a bigger boon than any amount of efficiently extracted silver. The Hanoverian dukes were an offshoot of a junior branch of the Welf dynasty, whose long history Leibniz was commissioned to write. He never finished this compendious work—there was always a fascinating new morsel to add—but his relentless archival digging helped the duchy make its case for promotion to an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire.
Medieval history, metaphysics, and geology were not nearly enough to keep Leibniz busy in early 1686. In January, he wrote an article exposing what he took to be a notable blunder in Descartes’s physics. Descartes regarded force as the product of mass and velocity, whereas Leibniz argued that it was better seen as mass times the square of velocity. This move brought Leibniz close to the modern notion of kinetic energy. In April, he began writing a hundred-page “Examination of the Christian Religion,” and not long afterward he composed his most substantial treatise on logic. It contained a pioneering algebra of propositions, similar to the logical calculus invented in the mid-nineteenth century by the English mathematician George Boole. Boole’s creation is a large part of the basis for computer languages. When he learned of Leibniz’s precursor to his handiwork, Boole said that he felt as if Leibniz had shaken hands with him across the centuries.
- Anthony Gottlieb, ‘He Was a Genius for the Ages. Can We Give Him a Break?’, New Yorker, 6 January 2025
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