The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days

This challenging debut biography from historian Kempe details seven eventful moments in the life of German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Kempe starts with Oct. 29, 1675, when Leibniz, in the course of inventing calculus while holed up in a squalid Parisian garret, introduced the integral symbol, the foundation of a notational system that made calculus a facile yet powerful tool for modeling dynamic processes. Other moments find Leibniz contemplating a scheme for uniting Christian denominations, how to invent a mechanical calculator, and his famous assertion that humans live in “the best of all possible worlds.” Kempe presents Leibniz as an icon of the early Enlightenment, constantly hatching schemes for technological and administrative progress. For example, in the early 1710s, Leibniz made unsuccessful appeals to his patron, Russian czar Peter the Great, to revamp the country’s educational system and fund a Siberian research expedition. Unfortunately, Kempe often struggles to clarify Leibniz’s abstruse ideas, especially his metaphysics. (Attempting to explain Leibniz’s binary theology, he writes, “God, as the absolute unity [1], created the world out of the void [0].... This means that nothing in the world is consummate... but at the same time there is no absolute nothingness, only relative nothingness.”) Despite the author’s best efforts, this doesn’t quite manage to bring Leibniz’s esoteric thinking down to earth. Photos. (Nov.)