Biography

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) was a German mathematician and philosopher. Known as a statesman to the general public of his own times and as a mathematician to his scholarly contemporaries, he was subsequently thought of primarily as a philosopher.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz was born in Leipzig on June 23, 1646. His father, who was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Leipzig, died in the boy's sixth year. As a result, his early education was somewhat haphazard, but through his own industry he was ready for the university at the age of 15. He pursued the course in law in preparation for a political career and also studied theology, mathematics, and the new natural philosophy of the Enlightenment, receiving his bachelor's degree in 1663.
After 3 years of further study at Leipzig, Leibniz transferred to the University of Altdorf, where he received his doctorate in law in 1667. He declined the offer of a professorship there and accepted instead a position in the service of the elector of Mainz.

Early Travels
At this time Louis XIV's aggressive activities were a serious threat to the German states, and in a pamphlet published in 1670 Leibniz proposed a defensive coalition of the northern European Protestant countries. At the same time, to give the German principalities, recently weakened by the Thirty Years War, a respite for economic recovery, he conceived a plan whereby Louis might gain Holland's valuable possessions in Asia by way of a "holy war" against non-Christian Egypt. Leibniz was invited to Paris to present his plan; although it was not adopted, his 4-year stay in the French capital, with visits to London in 1673 and 1676, was crucial for his intellectual development.
Before coming to Paris, Leibniz had devised a calculating machine based on the principles of an earlier one invented by Blaise Pascal but capable of performing much more complicated mathematical operations. His demonstrations of this machine before the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Royal Society of London aroused much interest and led to fruitful relations with members of these groups and to his election to membership in the Royal Society shortly after his first London visit.
Especially important as a stimulus to Leibniz's interest in mathematics was his contact in Paris with the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens, which resulted in Leibniz's developing both the integral and the differential calculus during the years of his residence there.