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Article: Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm (1646–1716)
- Article from:
- Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World
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LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM (1646
–
1716)
LEIBNIZ, GOTTFRIED WILHELM
(1646
–
1716), German philosopher, mathematician, physicist, historian, and diplomat. Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz was born at the end of the Thirty Years' War in Leipzig, a Protestant university town in Germany, where his father was a professor. His father died when Leibniz was only six, but he inherited his library and his respect for intellectual pursuits and from an early age read widely in the Latin classics, history, Christian theology, and logic. His precocious eclecticism foreshadowed the course of his later life. The sixty thousand handwritten pages that he left behind at his death (now ...