domingo, 13 de abril de 2014

LEIBNIZ IN SHORT

Gottfried von Leibniz: orphan of war, child prodigy, courtier, mathematician, computer science pioneer, and Enlightened philosopher. 

Gottfried von Leibniz, a Baroque-era courtier, mathematician, and philosopher, clearly told physical evil (pain, death, grief, the blues, violent deaths caused by accidents and natural disaster), founded on the laws of nature; from moral evil (oppression, warfare, persecution, murders...), caused by humans' wrong use of their free will.  Leibniz, born in Leipzig in 1646, lost both his parents to the Thirty Years' War, and he had to study pretty hard for getting the Law degree he wanted. Yet he entered the local university (had I ever told you that Leipzig has been "the Oxford of the Continent" for decades?) in his early teens, and then served at several electoral courts, before appearing in the entourage of Kaiser Charles VI himself.  He is also considered "the father of calculus", id est, he discovered the derivatives and functions that made me pass Maths. To crown the list of his achievements, Leibniz created the binary system: the zeroes and ones that make up every single word or picture in this blog (or any other site in the Net), and the cornerstone of our modern Information Age (whether social networks or space explorations)!
 Perchance his justified success story is the reason why he said that "we live in the best of all possible worlds".

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