On July 1st, world science celebrates the 380th anniversary of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's birth.
It's hard to find a field of science he hasn't touched. Encyclopedias list him as “philosopher, logician, mathematician, mechanic, physicist, lawyer, historian, diplomat, inventor, and linguist.” The Prussian king Frederick the Great, who patronized him, called him a “walking encyclopedia.”
It was in his works that the integral sign (an elongated S for "sum") first appeared. He laid the foundations of combinatorics, from which modern probability theory, logistics, and big data have grown. Long before Freud, he enriched psychology with the doctrine of the unconscious in the human mind.
Professor Sergei Borisov, Doctor of Philosophy and professor at the Department of Philosophy of SUSU, shares his insights on Leibniz:
“Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is a pivotal figure in European science and rationalist philosophy at the dawn of the modern era.
One can argue about philosophical truths endlessly and never reach an understanding. Leibniz offers an alternative: not “let us argue,” but “let us calculate.” In this way, delusions can be eliminated like “arithmetical errors,” and all contentious issues can be resolved through computation.
Leibniz was far ahead of his time and was the first to propose a “cybernetic model” of the Universe.
In modern terms, the Universe is a vast computer composed of multiple monads–substances, each possessing its own individual “program.” In other words, it is a “living mirror” that reflects the universe from its own perspective and “knows” the state of every other monad.
All states of the monads are coordinated with one another through the principle of “pre-established harmony,” instituted by the “Great Programmer”– God.
In this regard, the good news is that we live in the best of all possible worlds! After all, the best, according to Leibniz, is maximum diversity with the greatest possible order, achieved with the least possible means.
Do you believe that our world is the best possible? Yet nothing prevents us from striving toward it according to the universal formulas that Leibniz has revealed to us.”