Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German philosopher, mathematician and diplomat, best known for developing the differential and integral calculus independently of Isaac Newton and for his metaphysics of monads. He was born in Leipzig on 1 July 1646 and died in Hanover on 14 November 1716.

Leibniz took a doctorate in law at Altdorf in 1667 and then entered the service of the Elector of Mainz. A diplomatic mission took him to Paris from 1672 to 1676, where Christiaan Huygens guided his studies in mathematics and physics; a manuscript of November 1675 shows his first use of the integral sign. From the end of 1676 he lived in Hanover, working for its dukes as librarian and Privy Councillor. He set out his differential calculus in the journal Acta Eruditorum in 1684. In 1700 the Brandenburg Society of Sciences was founded in Berlin with Leibniz as its first president, and he had been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1673.

Much of his philosophy reached print only after his death. Of his two book-length philosophical treatises, only the Théodicée (1710) appeared in his lifetime. The Discourse on Metaphysics, written in 1686, was not printed until the 19th century; the Monadology of 1714 was published posthumously; and the New Essays on Human Understanding, his reply to John Locke, was composed around the turn of the 18th century but did not appear until 1765.

For collectors: because so much of Leibniz's work was published posthumously, the lifetime imprints, such as the 1710 Théodicée and his journal papers of the 1680s, are the original appearances of his ideas. The Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics and New Essays exist only in posthumous editions, so no lifetime first edition of them can be found.