Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his vast expertise across fields, which became a rarity after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. As a philosopher, he was a leading representative of 17th-century rationalism and idealism. His major mathematical achievement was the development of differential and integral calculus, independently of Newton. He is credited with devising the modern binary number system, the basis of modern communications and digital computing.